Home-manager: What files are touched by home-manager?

Created on 17 Dec 2018 · 5Comments · Source: nix-community/home-manager

Using home-manager is not possible for me currently, because it is not clear to me what is going to happen when I enable it. I have an existing .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile and similar for zsh.

I do not want these files to be overwritten, but if I know which ones are being used by home-manager, I could consider porting them.

Please document what the tool does more precisely.

Source

memberbetty

Most helpful comment

As documented in the README.md, section "Keeping your ~ safe from harm", it should be save to activate even with existing dotfiles.

When configuring your userspace with home-manager, the configurations will be added to the nix-store and symlinked into your ~.

By the way, if you worry about your dotfiles, I'd recommend doing a backup - this is unrelated to home-manager, but a backup might save you from other harm than a configuration mistake, too.

CRTified on 17 Dec 2018

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All 5 comments

As documented in the README.md, section "Keeping your ~ safe from harm", it should be save to activate even with existing dotfiles.

When configuring your userspace with home-manager, the configurations will be added to the nix-store and symlinked into your ~.

By the way, if you worry about your dotfiles, I'd recommend doing a backup - this is unrelated to home-manager, but a backup might save you from other harm than a configuration mistake, too.

CRTified on 17 Dec 2018

👍2

@memberbetty Yes, as @Amarandus said. Home Manager shouldn't overwrite an existing file, if it detects one then it will stop the switch before changing anything in the home directory.

If you manually want to check the files generated by Home Manager before switching then you can run home-manager build instead of home-manager switch. This will generate a symlink called result in the current directory, this links to the generated Home Manager generation. Run

$ find result/home-files/

to see all files that will be linked into your home directory.

rycee on 17 Dec 2018

Please consider creating a link from the installation section to the "Keeping your ~ safe from harm" section.

memberbetty on 18 Dec 2018

I'd suggest simply reading all of the README.. There is a usage section which is quite relevant as well, and would let you know what files would be touched intuitively. The Keeping your ~ safe from harm section simply mentions that home-manager will not override files unless it is already managed by home-manager.