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symlinkconfiguration-filesnixosdotfiles

How to insert the configuration.nix file inside my dot files?

I am creating my dot files following this tutorial. It successfully works for emacs.d.

Since I am using NixOS, I tried doing exactly the same steps with symlink creation for the configuration.nix file. Thus, I did:

1 - On terminal:

[pedro@system:/etc/nixos]$ sudo mv /etc/nixos/configuration.nix ~/.dotfiles/

2 - Then:

[pedro@system:/etc/nixos]$ ln -sf ~/.dotfiles/configuration.nix configuration.nix~

3 - It seems to work fine, as I do:

[pedro@system:/etc/nixos]$ ls -la
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Dec  1 21:41 .
drwxr-xr-x 32 root root 4096 Dec  1 22:00 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   39 Dec  1 21:41 configuration.nix~ -> /home/pedro/.dotfiles/configuration.nix
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  842 Nov 12 17:40 hardware-configuration.nix

After doing some editions and saving the changes, I can't do nixos-rebuild switch, though. It throws an error:

[pedro@system:/etc/nixos]$ sudo nixos-rebuild switch 
warning: Nix search path entry '/etc/nixos/configuration.nix' does not exist, ignoring
error: file 'nixos-config' was not found in the Nix search path (add it using $NIX_PATH or -I), at /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixos/default.nix:1:60
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
building Nix...
warning: Nix search path entry '/etc/nixos/configuration.nix' does not exist, ignoring
error: file 'nixos-config' was not found in the Nix search path (add it using $NIX_PATH or -I), at /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixos/default.nix:1:60
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
building the system configuration...
warning: Nix search path entry '/etc/nixos/configuration.nix' does not exist, ignoring
error: file 'nixos-config' was not found in the Nix search path (add it using $NIX_PATH or -I), at /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixos/default.nix:1:60
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)

The ~ after configuration.nix~ might be the problem here. How can I fix this?

Thanks!

Solution

  • Your Step 2 seems to have cause the issue here: The symlink should be called configuration.nix not configuration.nix~ as you have noticed.

    You could fix this by running mv configuration.nix~ configuration.nix in the /etc/nixos folder which would rename configuration.nix~ to the correct configuration.nix.