NixOS + home-manager flake

A flake-based NixOS and home-manager configuration: a set of reusable modules plus a ready-to-run example host that assembles them. Use it either way:

• as a starting template — clone, swap in your hardware, rebuild; or
• as modules — import them into your own (private) flake.

Quick start (template)

nix flake init -t github:<owner>/<repo>        # or: git clone …
# generate hardware config for THIS machine (the one file you must replace):
sudo nixos-generate-config --show-hardware-config > hosts/example/hardware-configuration.nix
# set your hostName + username in hosts/example/default.nix, then:
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#example

nixosConfigurations.example is a real, buildable machine assembled from the modules in modules/. It doubles as living documentation: it shows exactly how the modules wire together, so there's nothing to reverse-engineer. The only genuinely machine-specific file is hardware-configuration.nix (NixOS generates it); everything else works from defaults you can tweak.

Import the modules into your own flake

Add this repo as a flake input and import its modules from your own configuration:

{
  inputs.config.url = "github:<owner>/<repo>";
  # …
  outputs = { nixpkgs, config, home-manager, ... }: {
    nixosConfigurations.myhost = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      modules = [
        config.nixosModules.default
        ./hosts/myhost                 # your hardware + hostname
        home-manager.nixosModules.home-manager
        { home-manager.users.me.imports = [ config.homeModules.default ]; }
      ];
    };
  };
}

Your machine list, hostnames, and any private specifics stay in your flake — you pull only the generic modules from here.

Architecture: three layers

Kept apart on purpose. When adding config, decide which layer it belongs to:

1. Modules — generic, public (this repo). Reusable building blocks under modules/, exposed as nixosModules.* / homeModules.*. Anything machine- or user-specific is a module option with a sane default — never hard-code personal values into a module.
2. Inventory — topology, private (your flake). The actual machines: nixosConfigurations.<host>, per-host hosts/<host>/ (hardware, hostname), and topology-revealing config (SSH hosts, Syncthing peers, internal IPs). This is what you deploy from; it imports the modules above. Publish the modules, keep the inventory in a private repo. The example host here is a placeholder-filled stand-in for it.
3. Secrets — neither repo. Private keys, tokens, passwords never enter any repo. Provide them as runtime files (0600, out-of-band) or via a secrets manager that decrypts to a runtime path; nix references only the path.

Layout

flake.nix            # inputs + outputs (nixosModules, homeModules, example host, devShells)
modules/             # the reusable library
hosts/example/       # the template host (placeholder hardware-configuration.nix)

Shared *.nix / *.lock live at the top level; per-host files under hosts/<host>/.