This repo is meant to be a declarative setup for new macOS devices, specifically focused on the application installs. All GUI applications will be handled by homebrew and some brews or CLI tools. The more stable and maintained CLI tools are installed via nixpkgs.

This config contains options for both personal user and work use. There are shared packages found in modules/apps along with "profile" specific packages in their respective directories profiles/personal and profiles/work.

Installation

Have an implementation of nix installed nixos.org
Clone this repo onto the machine (probably fastest via usb) or install git seperatly and run git clone https://git.briannelson.dev/brian/nix-darwin.git
Copy the repo into /etc/nix-darwin

sudo mkdir -p /etc/nix-darwin
sudo chown $(id -nu):$(id -ng) /etc/nix-darwin
sudo cp [PATH/TO/REPO] /etc/nix-darwin

cd /etc/nix-darwin
Choose which profile to use and run one of the following commands

# personal use option
sudo darwin-rebuild switch --flake ".#personal"

# work option
sudo darwin-rebuild switch --flake ".#work"

Homebrew

I like using homebrew as my package manager for most apps as its really easy and convienent to run brew upgrade to update all apps in 1 go. I love nix for many other reasons but some of the packages on the stable branch aren't always up-to-date and take a while to update.

Future Options

I like the option of setting the dock up using some of the options in nix-darwin but only on initial build. I found that getting the macOS machine setup with nix-darwin and setting all the dock apps was cool but if you made changes to to dock for whatever reason (installing a new app, having a different prefernce, etc.), rebuilding the system would then set the dock back to the original option.

I think that the use of Homebrew can help with this a little bit in the sense that I can update most apps without having to rebuild the system. So making changes to the dock via the "normal" click and drag on macOS can stay persistent for the most part but remembering to set the change in the config will be important for rebuilds.