NH is a modern helper utility aims to consolidate and reimplement some of the commands from the NixOS ecosystem, including relevant 3rd party tools. Our goal is to provide a uniform interface with more features, and better ergonomics than existing commands.
nh os- reimplementsnixos-rebuild1 with the addition of- build-tree displays.
- diff of changes.
- confirmation.
nh home- reimplementshome-manager.nh darwin- which reimplementsdarwin-rebuild.
nh search- a super-fast package searching tool (powered by a ElasticSearch client).nh clean- a re-implementation ofnix-collect-garbagethat also collects gcroots.
The latest, tagged version will is available in Nixpkgs as NH stable. This repository provides the latest development version of NH, which you can get from the flake outputs.
nix shell nixpkgs#nh # stable
nix shell github:nix-community/nh # devWe provide a NixOS module that integrates nh clean as a service. To enable it,
set the following configuration:
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
programs.nh = {
enable = true;
clean.enable = true;
clean.extraArgs = "--keep-since 4d --keep 3";
flake = "/home/user/my-nixos-config";
};
}Nh supports both Flakes and classical NixOS configurations:
- For flakes, the command is
nh os switch /path/to/flake - For a classical configuration:
nh os switch -f '<nixpkgs/nixos>', ornh os switch -f '<nixpkgs/nixos>' -- -I nixos-config=/path/to/configuration.nixif using a different location than the default.
You might want to check nh os --help for other values and the defaults from
environment variables.
Nh is capable of detecting which specialisation you are running, so it runs the
proper activation script. To do so, you need to give Nh some information of the
spec that is currently running by writing its name to /etc/specialisation. The
config would look like this:
{config, pkgs, ...}: {
specialisation."foo".configuration = {
environment.etc."specialisation".text = "foo";
# ..rest of config
};
specialisation."bar".configuration = {
environment.etc."specialisation".text = "bar";
# ..rest of config
};
}Home specialisations are read from ~/.local/share/home-manager/specialisation.
The config would look like this:
{config, pkgs, ...}: {
specialisation."foo".configuration = {
xdg.dataFile."home-manager/specialisation".text = "foo";
# ..rest of config
};
specialisation."bar".configuration = {
xdg.dataFile."home-manager/specialisation".text = "bar";
# ..rest of config
};
}Contributions are always welcome. Just clone the repository and run
nix develop. We also provide a .envrc for Direnv users.
Once your changes are complete, remember to run fix.sh to apply general formatter and linter rules that will be expected by the CI.
Lastly, update the changelog and open your pull request.
NH would not be posible without that nh runs under the hood:
- Tree of builds with nix-output-monitor.
- Visualization of the upgrade diff with nvd.
- And of course, all the crates we depend on.
