this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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Nix / NixOS

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Hi! I'm trying out Nix and I'm trying to set up and organize everything. Usually I put all my configs in a directory which is also a git repo and synced to my NAS, using the same subfolders they'd be in, and use GNU Stow to symlink the top-level folders (/dotfiles/home/ to /home/username/, /dotfiles/etc to /etc and /dotfiles/usr to /usr) and let it do its thing. Would it cause problems to also do that for configuration.nix?

On Arch I already had a /dotfiles/etc symlinked to /etc for my custom keyboard layouts, which worked fine... until the update which moved the location of the GUI keyboard layouts. It prevented the update so I undid the symlinks, updated, and put them again to the new location... but somehow it broke everything except the tty and no Wayland compositor I tried would work anymore (and there went my record of having never broken Arch since the first install over a year ago ๐Ÿ˜… )

So I'm kinda wary of doing it on an even more critical file... but also I'm very lazy and having everything in a single repo is very convenient... How do you do it?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Check out gnu stow. Its designed exactly for this.

Edit: added link

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yes that's what I'm using, it's really a great program! But I was wondering if configuration.nix being a symlink would cause problems or if it was fine

Edit: Ah someone else already replied that it was fine ๐Ÿ™‚