nix-darwin flake

first run on computer

the repo lives in /etc/nix-darwin and every user works in it directly, sharing the same jj/git working copy. safe.directory for this path is set for every user in modules/home-manager/git.nix.

• install nix (this is the lix installer but it's recommended by nix as it has an uninstaller)
• clone the repo into /etc and give the staff group write access to it:

# /etc is owned by root, so the empty target has to exist before cloning into it
sudo mkdir /etc/nix-darwin
sudo chown jblik:staff /etc/nix-darwin
# inherited, so every file git and jj create is group writable regardless of each user's umask
chmod +a "group:staff allow list,add_file,search,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,file_inherit,directory_inherit" /etc/nix-darwin

cd /etc && git clone ssh://git@codeberg.org/jblik/nix-darwin.git
git -C /etc/nix-darwin config core.sharedRepository group

• sudo scutil --set LocalHostName Jacobs-MacBook-Pro if the hostname differs, as darwin-rebuild builds the configuration named after it
• sudo nix run nix-darwin/nix-darwin-26.05#darwin-rebuild -- switch (installs darwin-rebuild, afterwards sudo darwin-rebuild switch is enough)
• jj git init in /etc/nix-darwin to colocate jj with the git repo (jj is installed by the rebuild)

once it's installed

from any path you can run:

• nix-rebuild which will rebuild configuration (darwin-rebuild switch)
• nix-update which will perform a flake update and a brew upgrade then rebuild
• nix-gc {days:30} which performs garbage collection and store optimization
• nix-update-gc performs nix-update && nix-gc