I use nix-darwin and also manage my homebrew packages with it. Maybe you can take a look at that.
replyMay I ask for what do you use it at work? I have a few places I think nix might suit but I can’t really put my finger on it.
I’m not sure what I would get out of nix-Darwin. It looks like it does not solve any of the problems I am trying to solve? I don’t need or want configuration management on my personal systems, except for the web servers, which I manage using Terraform and Ansible (I am happy with these).
replyWe use Nix at work for all sorts of stuff. Binaries run in production from Nix paths. Software we build has dependencies in Nix. People on workstations run commands from Nix paths. The OS is not Nix, but the Nix package manager looks like it’s on its way to consuming most of our dependencies. It is not used for building or deploying our code, though.
I was interested in Nix because it could automate setup and configuration of macOS features. But all it does is usually run defaults or some intermediatary. In the end I stuck with brew and wrote an idempotent setupmac() function in my bash_profile (I use bash 5) with the aid of chatgpt since it knows all the cool defaults commands, and it’s pretty much solved setting up a new account or mac (alongside a Brewfile I maintain in my dotfiles). I don’t need any of those highfalutin tools.
replyI am, like, two minutes away from getting my configuration back on a fresh Mac or Linux system without Nix, so configuration management is just irrelevant to me. I am evaluating it as a package manager and a way to setup development environments.
replyVery glad to hear this, thanks for posting.
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