NixOS on single-user machine - best practice?

Help
1

Following instructions on the wiki, I have successfully created a nix expression to build R with the packages I use. I installed it into my user profile, and it works.

{
    packageOverrides = super: let self = super.pkgs; in
    {

        rEnv = super.rWrapper.override {
            packages = with self.rPackages; [
                ggplot2
		lubridate
                reshape2
                tidyverse
		xts
                ];
        };
    };
}

However, I’m on a single-user machine, so I would like to be able to rebuild everything using nixos-rebuild switch. So I put the above expression into a file called /etc/nixos/R.nix, and then used it in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix like so

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{
  imports =
    [ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
      /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix
      /etc/nixos/R.nix
    ];

  . . .

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    . . .
    rEnv
    . . .
  ];

I got the following error message.

# nixos-rebuild switch
error: The option `packageOverrides' defined in `/etc/nixos/R.nix' does not exist.
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
building Nix...
error: The option `packageOverrides' defined in `/etc/nixos/R.nix' does not exist.
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
building the system configuration...
error: The option `packageOverrides' defined in `/etc/nixos/R.nix' does not exist.
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)

What am I doing wrong?

2

I think this section in the manual is what you’re looking for (packageOverrides → nixpkgs.config.packageOverrides).

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