home-manager installation broken

[sigmonsays]

This is follow up from #12, tried with the new version and it still fails to install

sig@lab2:~$ nix-shell '<home-manager>' -A install
The file /home/sig/.config/home-manager/home.nix already exists, leaving it unchanged...

Creating initial Home Manager generation...

/nix/store/46i45az0snfq9y75zfx5gcgv1bmh3840-home-manager-generation
Starting Home Manager activation
Could not find suitable profile directory, tried /home/sig/.local/state/nix/profiles and /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/sig
Uh oh, the installation failed! Please create an issue at

    https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues

if the error seems to be the fault of Home Manager.

should I attempt the installation differently?

PS: You asked em to re-open the issue if it did not work but I do not have permission to do so.

[sigmonsays]

messing with this a little bit more I noticed that if I create ~/.local/state/nix/profiles i get different results but home-manager still does not install.

Something about running the home-manager install just hangs

sig@lab2:~$ nix-shell '<home-manager>' -A install
unpacking 'github:NixOS/nixpkgs/9189ac18287c599860e878e905da550aa6dec1cd' into the Git cache..
 [ hangs ]

If I attmpt a nix run it fails differently

sig@lab2:~$ nix run home-manager/master -- init --switch
The file /home/sig/.config/home-manager/home.nix already exists, leaving it unchanged...
The file /home/sig/.config/home-manager/flake.nix already exists, leaving it unchanged...

Creating initial Home Manager generation...

Starting Home Manager activation
Activating checkFilesChanged
Activating checkLinkTargets
Activating writeBoundary
Creating new profile generation
Activating installPackages
error: profile '/home/sig/nixsa/state/profiles/profile' is incompatible with 'nix-env'; please use 'nix profile' instead

Oops, Nix failed to install your new Home Manager profile!

Perhaps there is a conflict with a package that was installed using
"nix-env -i"? Try running

    nix-env -q

and if there is a conflicting package you can remove it with

    nix-env -e {package name}

Then try activating your Home Manager configuration again.
Uh oh, the installation failed! Please create an issue at

    https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues

if the error seems to be the fault of Home Manager.
sig@lab2:~$

[jrbp]

I wasn't able to reproduce your error exactly, but I have run in to some quirks related to home-manager and nixsa each trying to keep state and profiles in separate places. I describe some of the workarounds I'm experimenting with below, but given that I don't have your exact error I recommend you start with a fresh nixsa directory (and possibly ~/.local/state/nix if home-manager wrote to it and nothing else is using it) before trying anything.

On more recent versions of nixsa (newer than the latest "release", so from master) we can run nixsa with the environment variable:

NIXSA_BWRAP_ARGS="--bind /path/to/your/nixsadir/state $HOME/.local/state/nix"

which will have home-manager store state in the same place as nixsa. Evidently home-manager doesn't respect the NIX_STATE_HOME envar.

I also had to make a symlink in ~/.nix-profile to ~/.local/state/nix/profiles/profile which I would have thought would be created automatically.

Generally home-manager wants to put a bunch of symlinks to the nix store in your home directory (that's like its main thing), while nixsa keeps all state in the nixsa directory. Even with this fix some home-manager functionality will only work within a shell started by nixsa (where /nix is mounted). Always working in a shell started by nixsa seems to have a few papercuts for my use case, so I'm still looking in to other options.

[alurm]

Hey @sigmonsays, I also had trouble running home-manager with nixsa, so I wrote my own tool.

https://github.com/alurm/json2dir/blob/main/home.md

You can try using it instead.

But maybe the previous answer will work for you (I haven't tried it).