Rebuild errors mentioning a deleted user

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1

I previously created a second user account by adding a section like this to my NixOS configuration:

users.users.otheruser = {
  isNormalUser = true;
  description = "Other User";
  shell = pkgs.zsh;
  extraGroups = [ "networkmanager" "wheel" ];
};

home-manager.users.otheruser = import /home/otheruser/.config/home-manager/home.nix;

I’ve since decided I don’t need this user account, so I removed the section above from my configuration, and manually ran sudo userdel -r otheruser and sudo groupdel otheruser as per the NixOS User Management instructions. Note I don’t have users.mutableUsers = false set.

However, now every time I run sudo -i nixos-rebuild switch the rebuild fails with errors like this:

       error:
       Failed assertions:
       - Exactly one of users.users.otheruser.isSystemUser and users.users.otheruser.isNormalUser must be set.

       - users.users.otheruser.group is unset. This used to default to
       nogroup, but this is unsafe. For example you can create a group
       for this user with:
       users.users.otheruser.group = "otheruser";
       users.groups.otheruser = {};

I’m quite sure my NixOS configuration is not referencing the other user account anywhere now, so I don’t know where this error is coming from?

Both user accounts were using home-manager in the NixOS module mode, with both users having the home-manager.users.username = import /path/to/home.nix section. I’ve tried commenting out all mention of home-manager, including the import of <home-manager/nixos>, but that doesn’t seem to have changed the result.

I’m not sure if this is a NixOS problem or a home-manager problem?

I’m running NixOS 24.05. sudo -i nix-channel --list shows:

home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-24.05.tar.gz
nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-24.05
1 Like
2

I assume it does and that is probably where the error is coming from. Do you have your config (the whole config) uploaded anywhere?

4

Agh. Yes, it turns out one of files I include for desktop systems has something like this:

users.users.otheruser = {
    extraGroups = [ "video" "input" ]
};

and that was setting enough config under users.users.otheruser to cause the error above.

I wish the error message was a little clearer here, but I can understand how setting that caused an issue considering how NixOS configuration is structured.