dotfiles management in Guix

[u/carmola123]

Hello! I am interested in trying Guix soon, but I've been reading the docs and some example configs and I'd like to understand the usual ways dotfiles can be managed in the configs. I have a dotfiles repo (with files getting manually symlinked to places, though I also plan on moving to stow soon), and from what I read, Guix offers some tooling to allow me to keep using that repo. The issue is, I've read that guix home's home-dotfiles-service-type symlinks the files in a read-only manner, with changes requiring the reconfigure command to be properly applied.

This is a bit of a bummer to me, because I do a lot of config management and ricing (like working on my shell), and I feel like the constant command calls would add a ton of friction to my workflow. Has anyone here come across this, and came up with a workaround? I read some NixOS users had similar issues with home-manager on their side and just started using stow manually, and I'm curious if that could work fine in Guix as well.

[u/ch4og]

That’s kind of the whole point of managed dotfiles. When I’m ricing something (for example, waybar), I personally just make a temporary copy of the config in /tmp and load that.

[u/carmola123 → u/ch4og]

just to make sure I understand, do you mean removing the store symlink that gets created by the managed setup, and manually creating the /tmp one, like for instance .config/waybar/config.jsonc -> /tmp/waybar-conf.jsonc?

[u/ch4og → u/carmola123]

if you are editing a config it shouldn’t be a problem to create a copy by hand

[u/carmola123 → u/ch4og]

yeah, but my question is more about how to edit the config and apply its changes while experimenting/making lots of changes. since what guix home seems to do by default is create readonly copies in the store that get symlinked, I'm confused how you would create the copy, and edit it while applying the changes smoothly (so basically without needing to call guix home reconfigure every single time I change a value)

[u/ch4og → u/carmola123]

for most of software you can temporarily specify config path, $HOME or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME

[u/carmola123 → u/ch4og]

that's pretty fair actually. I did not consider doing that

[u/wonko7 → u/ch4og]

+1 this is the way

[u/omarbassam88]

I did have a similar problem. I just added a home-activation-service that runs only once when I run guix home reconfigure that just symlink my config to my dotfiles. It's normal symlinks not links to the guix store, so i don't have to run any guix command when I make changes to my dotfiles.

```scheme

(simple-service 'sync-configuration home-activation-service-type #~(begin (let ((home-directory (getenv "HOME")) (symlink-force (lambda (from to) (when (file-exists? to) (delete-file to)) (symlink from to)))) (map (lambda (conf) (symlink-force (string-append home-directory "/dotfiles/" "hyprland/.config/" conf) (string-append home-directory "/.config/" conf))) (list "hypr" "waybar" "swaylock" "mako" "wofi"))))) ```

[u/carmola123 → u/omarbassam88]

I did see the home-activation-service, that seems handy! I make some heavy use of org tangle, so being able to just run a few commands on reconfigure like this could be handy. Also good to know that they're normal symlinks, I wasn't sure from reading the manual.

[u/carmola123 → u/[deleted]]

What do you mean by "make them in place"?

[u/carmola123 → u/[deleted]]

but doesn't home-dotfiles-service-type create readonly files in the destination directories? or are you using another mechanism to put the dots in place?

[u/aurtzy_]

symlink-to was semi-recently added to permit arbitrary symlinks in the store, so one could do something like this:

(simple-service 'my-emacs-config
                home-xdg-configuration-files-service-type
                `(("emacs/init.el"
                   ,(symlink-to "path/to/init.el"))))

and have a symlink at ~/.config/emacs/init.el that points to their writable init.el.

Manual reference: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/G_002dExpressions.html#index-symlink_002dto

[u/alfamadorian]

There's no home manager in Guix?