QoS: Dots & SUNix

This blogpost would have been too short if I only talked about a single topic, so I decided to combine both topics into a single post, as both qualify as actual Quality Of Service (QoS) improvements to my workflows.

SUNix: Software Updates for Nix

SUNix is a recent project I worked on that provides a feature many standard Linux distros ship with: “Available Software Updates”. Ever wanted to know what packages would be upgraded or removed with the next nixpkgs upgrade without switching yet?

The following video showcases the first version 0.1.0.

Diff Reports

Furthermore, the newer version 0.2.0 ships with a new feature: PDF and Markdown reports. I was too lazy to record another video just to show that, but you can get a pretty good idea by looking at the Markdown reports generated for this Pull Request.

These reports can be generated directly from the UI or via the CLI, e.g.

nix build --print-out-paths --no-link \
  .#nixosConfigurations.<your_flake>.config.system.build.toplevel \
  | xargs dix /run/current-system/ \
  | sunix --markdown-report "NixOS .#<your_flake>"

And the PDF reports are very pretty as well 🤩, but that’s just a bonus.

Dots: the HM module you didn’t know you needed

This is a quick follow-up post from Home Manager: dotfiles management, written a while ago now. In the last part of this old post, I’ve introduced a dotfiles Home Manager module, which was on the right track.

However, each module that needed to handle mutable configuration files looked something like this:

{ pkgs, lib, config, ... }:

let
  filePath = "${config.dotfiles.path}/programs/neofetch/electric.conf";
  configSrc =
    if !config.dotfiles.mutable then ./electric.conf
    else config.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink filePath;
in
{
  home.packages = [ pkgs.neofetch ];
  xdg.configFile."neofetch/config.conf".source = configSrc;
}

The mkOutOfStoreSymlink function was leaking everywhere, so I’ve come up with a better implementation of the dotfiles module ever since. To give you an idea on the current looks, the equivalent would now be this (if I still used neofetch):

{ pkgs, config, ... }:

{
  home.packages = [ pkgs.neofetch ];
  xdg.configFile."neofetch/config.conf".source =
    config.dotfiles.make ./electric.conf;
}

Neat! Isn’t it? The dotfiles.make function encapsulates all the symlinking logic now.

This newly improved module lives now under the dots repo, and everyone can benefit from it. All you have to do is import the module (see instructions in the README file) and set the following options:

{ config, ... }:

{
  dotfiles = {
    mutable = true;
    path = "${config.home.homeDirectory}/workspace/nix-config/home";
    sourceRoot = ./.;
  };
}

The module has good test coverage, and the documentation explains these options in detail if you’d like to learn more.

Why mutability?

An essential part of my workflows is the ability to tinker with configuration files freely without home-manager switch getting in the way of experimenting — like adding keybindings to my Niri configuration or adjusting the blur levels of certain layers.

At the same time, I don’t want to give up the reproducibility and portability that immutable configuration files give me. For instance, I could share my Neovim wrapper and anyone could run the same exact version with all the plugins and keybindings I set up.

The dotfiles module gives us the best of both worlds with none of the fuzz.

Final thoughts

These little two projects have brought me much joy recently, so I hope you enjoy them too!

Best, Gabriel.