Support shared home-manager configurations between all users

[vlaci]

#549 is broke my configuration. I have created a NixOS module where I can declare a "shared" home manager configuration which is applied to all users managed by nix. I use this approach to generate homogeneous user environments.

The above mentioned change introduces infinite recursion because now home-manager writes the users.users attribute.

I can work around this problem but I thought that it worth to mention this use case [1]

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[1] Upon writing the issue description I remembered this xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/1172/

[kalbasit]

I use something very similar to you, by assigning one home-manager config to multiple users, and this has not broken my setup. Perhaps it's something specific to you? Can you point out how it's setup on your side?

Here's how it's setup on my side:

• I added a NixOS option called mine.home-manager.config
• NixOS configuration imports home.nix that sets the above option
• home-manager.users gets set by calling the above config option.

[1] Upon writing the issue description I remembered this xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/1172/

I love it 🤣!

[vlaci]

Your configuration gave me the original inspiration for my version. The difference is that I use users.users directly instead of a separate users attribute set hence the recursion.

[kalbasit]

@vlaci oh I see, makes sense. @rycee thoughts on how to avoid the infinite loop here?

[rycee]

Ah, this was unfortunate! I think to fix it one would have to change
https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/blob/f07510e2b63075a5e334e603f666c5c5838563ce/nixos/default.nix#L47
to be completely inside a mkIf. I guess using mkMerge. I'll see if I get an opportunity to fix it tomorrow. Thanks for reporting the bug!

[vlaci]

I have fixed this issue on my side. I have already created my own users.users wrapper where I can set all the attributes I need and use that as a single source of truth to assign both home-manager.users and users.users in a similar fassion @kalbasit does.

Thank you for the effort you have put in investigating this.
Cheers!

[AkechiShiro]

Is there any recommended way to do this nowadays? Using perhaps, only home-manager ?

[hraban]

Thanks for fixing, @rycee -- I use this and it's a nice feature

[Bert-Proesmans]

This recursion can be solved by pulling config from within users.users.<name> eg,

options.users.users = mkOption {
    type = types.attrsOf (types.submodule ({name, config, ...}: {
      config = mkIf (config.enable && cfg.useUserPackages && (lib.hasAttr name cfg.users)) {
        packages = [cfg.users.${name}.home.path];
      };
    }));
  };

this allows doing funky stuff with users.users like intersecting with home-manager modules eg,

{lib, /* custom arg */ flake, config, ...}: {
    home-manager.useUserPackages = true;
    home-manager.users = builtins.intersectAttrs (lib.filterAttrs (_: v: v.isNormalUser) config.users.users) (flake.outputs.homeModules.users);
}

I can do a PR with this change