[cole-h]

I'd also suggest that, once you _do_ feel comfortable enough to step foot into NixOS territory, that you start off by version-controlling your configuration. It doesn't necessarily have to be public, but I've found it very helpful in the past when I've had to debug various issues due to misconfiguration by me.

[wingmanjd]

Do you symlink your config repo to /etc/nixos or something else? So far, I've just been rsyncing my config repo folder after I modify it.

[cole-h]

I don't; my config lives in ~/flake, and I run `nixos-rebuild ... --flake ~/flake` whenever I update it.

[grhmc]

You can actually put your NixOS config anywhere. Assuming you're not using flakes, `nixos-rebuild` finds the config through NIX_PATH:

grahamc@scruffy:~/ > echo $NIX_PATH

nixpkgs=/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos:nixos-config=/etc/nixos/configuration.nix:/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels

you can change the `nixos-config` value to point to somewhere else, or call it like this:`nixos-rebuild -I nixos-config=./configuration.nix`

[Filligree]

I use an update script that overrides that location to $(pwd), and also uses nvd to print a package diff for the update. Among a few other niceties. With flakes, that's a regular nixos-rebuild flag; otherwise it's an envvar.

/etc/nixos is just the default, there's a number of ways to set your own path. One of the simplest might be to put "import /home/wherever" as the sole contents of configuration.nix.

[kevincox]

Yeah, I symlink `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` to my git repo. (I do keep a `hardware-configuration.nix` which isn't version controlled. I probably should add version-control at some point but for now it is simple enough to copy around and maybe make some minor tweaks).

[mfsch]

You can also use `git init --separate-git-dir=~/something /etc/nixos` to keep the git data in your user directory while the config remains in the default location. I like this solution because it keeps the stuff I want to do as root (configuring the system) separate from what I want to do as regular user (tracking changes of the configuration).