Brew-Nix: a flake automatically packaging all homebrew casks

[madmax96]

I love nix on macOS. But one word of caution: nix uses a very outdated, EOL’d, macOS SDK (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/101229).

[viraptor]

In practice, it's not that restricting. It's pretty rare to find something actually requiring a more recent version. (And there's slow progress in updating it)

[loveparade]

This looks interesting. Personally I have been moving away from homebrew and use nix-darwin (https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin) with home-manager for my local software. It has been working great, but there are still a few packages that require Homebrew due to their complex build process. Maybe this helps.

[srid]

You don't even need nix-darwin per se. You can get by just with home-manager and do a lot with it.

Here's a template config to get started:

https://github.com/juspay/nix-dev-home

---

That said, nix-darwin is still useful for doing system level things, like enabling Touch ID for `sudo`. I use that in my config: https://github.com/srid/nixos-config

[conradev]

Same. The story with app bundles in Nix is a little rough, currently, though:

- Located in the nix store, so not indexed by Spotlight

- Not signed so I have to grant permissions all over again when an app gets rebuilt

[parhamn]

Mind sharing some reasons to switch? Been meaning to check out nix.

[aliasxneo]

I always have brew available because I inevitably run into issues with Nix packages (primarily managed by home-manager) on a pretty regular basis. Feels like I would be going in the opposite direction by wrapping them in Nix.

[pxc]

What kinds of issues do you run into most often? What have you run into recently?

[ThrowawayTestr]

I love how this title is incomprehensible to 99% of people

[muixoozie]

Yea, I have no idea what a homebrew cask is. (Joking.. I am the 1%)

[KolenCh]

Reading the comments, may be it is worth clarifying: this allows macOS users with nix package manager to install brew cask (I.e. typically GUI program that companies releases as pkg or dmg, etc., such as Mathematica, GitHub Desktop, Adobe CC…) without having brew at all.

I.e. it “steals” those brew cask formula and automatically repackage them as nix packages.

A closely related usage would be macOS with nix with nix-darwin, and using nix-darwin config to includes brew casks. This way, nix-darwin assumes brew exists and uses brew to install those casks.

This does have a major distinction on where the applications actually located, where some applications would upset if it is not inside /Applications.

[okkdev]

This is cool, but I still need some packages that only work through brew. What I've done is to just let nix generate a Brewbundle file and run the bundle install when it changes. https://github.com/okkdev/dotnix/blob/main/home%2Fhomebrew.n...