Next: Shells, Up: Home Services [Contents][Index]
There are a few essential home services defined in
(gnu home services), they are mostly for internal use and are
required to build a home environment, but some of them will be useful
for the end user.
The service of this type will be instantiated by every home environment automatically by default, there is no need to define it, but someone may want to extend it with a list of pairs to set some environment variables.
(list ("ENV_VAR1" . "value1")
("ENV_VAR2" . "value2"))
The easiest way to extend a service type, without defining a new service
type is to use the simple-service helper from (gnu
services).
(simple-service 'some-useful-env-vars-service
home-environment-variables-service-type
`(("LESSHISTFILE" . "$XDG_CACHE_HOME/.lesshst")
("SHELL" . ,(file-append zsh "/bin/zsh"))
("USELESS_VAR" . #f)
("_JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING" . #t)
("LITERAL_VALUE" . ,(literal-string "${abc}"))))
If you include such a service in you home environment definition, it will add the following content to the setup-environment script (which is expected to be sourced by the login shell):
export LESSHISTFILE="$XDG_CACHE_HOME/.lesshst"
export SHELL="/gnu/store/2hsg15n644f0glrcbkb1kqknmmqdar03-zsh-5.8/bin/zsh"
export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING
export LITERAL_VALUE='${abc}'
Notice that literal-string above lets us declare that a value is
to be interpreted as a literal string, meaning that “special
characters” such as the dollar sign will not be interpreted by the
shell.
Note: Make sure that module
(gnu packages shells)is imported withuse-modulesor any other way, this namespace contains the definition of thezshpackage, which is used in the example above.
The association list (see Association
Lists in The GNU Guile Reference manual) is a data structure
containing key-value pairs, for
home-environment-variables-service-type the key is always a
string, the value can be a string, string-valued gexp
(see G-Expressions), file-like object (see file-like object) or boolean. For gexps, the variable will be set to
the value of the gexp; for file-like objects, it will be set to the path
of the file in the store (see The Store); for #t, it will
export the variable without any value; and for #f, it will omit
variable.
The service of this type will be instantiated by every home environment automatically, there is no need to define it, but you may want to extend it with a list of packages if you want to install additional packages into your profile. Other services, which need to make some programs available to the user will also extend this service type.
The extension value is just a list of packages:
(list htop vim emacs)
The same approach as simple-service (see simple-service) for home-environment-variables-service-type can
be used here, too. Make sure that modules containing the specified
packages are imported with use-modules. To find a package or
information about its module use guix search (see Invoking guix package). Alternatively, specification->package can be
used to get the package record from a string without importing its
related module.
There are few more essential services, but users are not expected to extend them.
The root of home services DAG, it generates a folder, which later will be symlinked to ~/.guix-home, it contains configurations, profile with binaries and libraries, and some necessary scripts to glue things together.
The service of this type generates a Guile script, which is expected to
be executed by the login shell. It is only executed if the special flag
file inside XDG_RUNTIME_DIR hasn’t been created, this prevents
redundant executions of the script if multiple login shells are spawned.
It can be extended with a gexp. However, to autostart an application,
users should not use this service, in most cases it’s better to extend
home-shepherd-service-type with a Shepherd service
(see Shepherd Services), or extend the shell’s startup file with
the required command using the appropriate service type.
The service of this type allows to specify a list of files, which will go to ~/.guix-home/files, usually this directory contains configuration files (to be more precise it contains symlinks to files in /gnu/store), which should be placed in $XDG_CONFIG_DIR or in rare cases in $HOME. It accepts extension values in the following format:
`((".sway/config" ,sway-file-like-object) (".tmux.conf" ,(local-file "./tmux.conf")))
Each nested list contains two values: a subdirectory and file-like
object. After building a home environment ~/.guix-home/files
will be populated with appropriate content and all nested directories will
be created accordingly, however, those files won’t go any further until
some other service will do it. By default a
home-symlink-manager-service-type, which creates necessary
symlinks in home folder to files from ~/.guix-home/files and
backs up already existing, but clashing configs and other things, is a
part of essential home services (enabled by default), but it’s possible
to use alternative services to implement more advanced use cases like
read-only home. Feel free to experiment and share your results.
It is often the case that Guix Home users already have a setup for versioning their user configuration files (also known as dot files) in a single directory, and some way of automatically deploy changes to their user home.
The home-dotfiles-service-type from (gnu home services dotfiles)
is designed to ease the way into using Guix Home for this kind of users,
allowing them to point the service to their dotfiles directory without
migrating them to Guix native configurations.
Please keep in mind that it is advisable to keep your dotfiles directories under version control, for example in the same repository where you’d track your Guix Home configuration.
There are two supported dotfiles directory layouts, for now. The
'plain layout, which is structured as follows:
~$ tree -a ./dotfiles/ dotfiles/ ├── .gitconfig ├── .gnupg │ ├── gpg-agent.conf │ └── gpg.conf ├── .guile ├── .config │ ├── guix │ │ └── channels.scm │ └── nixpkgs │ └── config.nix ├── .nix-channels ├── .tmux.conf └── .vimrc
This tree structure is installed as is to the
home directory upon guix home reconfigure.
The 'stow layout, which must
follow the layout suggested by
GNU Stow presents an additional
application specific directory layer, just like:
~$ tree -a ./dotfiles/
dotfiles/
├── git
│ └── .gitconfig
├── gpg
│ └── .gnupg
│ ├── gpg-agent.conf
│ └── gpg.conf
├── guile
│ └── .guile
├── guix
│ └── .config
│ └── guix
│ └── channels.scm
├── nix
│ ├── .config
│ │ └── nixpkgs
│ │ └── config.nix
│ └── .nix-channels
├── tmux
│ └── .tmux.conf
└── vim
└── .vimrc
13 directories, 10 files
For an informal specification please refer to the Stow manual
(see Introduction). This tree structure is installed following
GNU Stow’s logic to the home directory upon guix home reconfigure.
A suitable configuration with a 'plain layout could be:
(home-environment
;; …
(services
(service home-dotfiles-service-type
(home-dotfiles-configuration
(directories '("./dotfiles"))))))
The expected home directory state would then be:
. ├── .config │ ├── guix │ │ └── channels.scm │ └── nixpkgs │ └── config.nix ├── .gitconfig ├── .gnupg │ ├── gpg-agent.conf │ └── gpg.conf ├── .guile ├── .nix-channels ├── .tmux.conf └── .vimrc
Return a service which is very similiar to home-files-service-type
(and actually extends it), but designed to ease the way into using Guix
Home for users that already track their dotfiles under some kind of version
control. This service allows users to point Guix Home to their dotfiles
directory and have their files automatically provisioned to their home
directory, without migrating all of their dotfiles to Guix native
configurations.
Available home-dotfiles-configuration fields are:
source-directory (default: (current-source-directory)) (type: string)The path where dotfile directories are resolved. By default dotfile
directories are resolved relative the source location where
home-dotfiles-configuration appears.
layout (default: 'plain) (type: symbol)The intended layout of the specified directory. It can be either
'stow or 'plain.
directories (default: '()) (type: list-of-strings)The list of dotfiles directories where home-dotfiles-service-type
will look for application dotfiles.
packages (type: maybe-list-of-strings)The names of a subset of the GNU Stow package layer directories. When provided
the home-dotfiles-service-type will only provision dotfiles from this
subset of applications. This field will be ignored if layout is set
to 'plain.
excluded (default: '(".*~" ".*\\.swp" "\\.git" "\\.gitignore")) (type: list-of-strings)The list of file patterns home-dotfiles-service-type will exclude
while visiting each one of the directories.
The service is very similar to home-files-service-type (and
actually extends it), but used for defining files, which will go to
~/.guix-home/files/.config, which will be symlinked to
$XDG_CONFIG_DIR by home-symlink-manager-service-type (for
example) during activation. It accepts extension values in the
following format:
`(("sway/config" ,sway-file-like-object) ;; -> ~/.guix-home/files/.config/sway/config ;; -> $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/sway/config (by symlink-manager) ("tmux/tmux.conf" ,(local-file "./tmux.conf")))
The service of this type generates a guile script, which runs on every
guix home reconfigure invocation or any other action, which
leads to the activation of the home environment.
The service of this type generates a guile script, which will be executed during activation of home environment, and do a few following steps:
home-files-service-type,
home-xdg-configuration-files-service-type and maybe some others),
takes the files from files/.config/ subdirectory and put
respective links in XDG_CONFIG_DIR. For example symlink for
files/.config/sway/config will end up in
$XDG_CONFIG_DIR/sway/config. The rest files in files/
outside of files/.config/ subdirectory will be treated slightly
different: symlink will just go to $HOME.
files/.some-program/config will end up in
$HOME/.some-program/config.
symlink-manager is a part of essential home services and is enabled and used by default.
Next: Shells, Up: Home Services [Contents][Index]