Ubuntu + Nix package manager & Services

Help
1

Hi,

I’m very new to Nix and in fact a Windows sysad as my background so please be gentle.

I’m trying to use multipass on Windows 10 to spin up a dev machine using Ubuntu and Nix as the package manager. Using home-manager so far so good, I’m learning a lot and all is well in terms getting packages on there and configuration.

The part I don’t understand;

  • I’m trying to run Docker and I get a permission denied when attempting to connect.
  • I’ve also noticed lorri service also doesn’t seem to run as expected.

My hypothesis is that I can’t use home-manager to handle services on a non-NixOS machine without manually creating service config files through systemd, is that correct?

2

Home-Manager should link all user related services to ~/.config/systemd/user. This is the regular location for user services IIRC.

You need to manually enable and start them though. Home-Manager doesn’t do that for you.

It will only print the systemctl --user commands you should run after a switch that causes a delta in services.

And the docker permission error is probably unrelated to Home-Manager. If it is because of some docker.sock file beeing not readable, it should be enough to add your user to the docker group.