Re: Running guix home + shepherd in non-Guix OS

[Carlo Zancanaro <carlo@zancanaro.id.au>]

Hi Abbé,

On Mon, Feb 05 2024, Abbé wrote:
> I'm wondering how would one go about integrating shepherd with 'guix
> home' configuration (i.e. home environment services), akin to what
> Guix does (I believe, without needing to do 'guix home ...').

How are you defining your Guix Home configuration? Have you run "guix
home reconfigure" with your Home config?

If you have done that, you should see ~/.profile contain the lines

  HOME_ENVIRONMENT=$HOME/.guix-home
  . $HOME_ENVIRONMENT/setup-environment
  $HOME_ENVIRONMENT/on-first-login

The on-first-login script is responsible for starting a Shepherd process
which will manage the shepherd services that are defined by your Home
config (if any). These services can then be managed with the "herd"
command, as usual.

When you run "guix home reconfigure" the reconfigure process will also
register/update shepherd services to match your new configuration. Any
running services will need to be restarted with "herd restart" to finish
their upgrade.

This is the same as how Guix Home works on a Guix system.

> Essentially, what should I put in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/shepherd/init.d/
> for it to execute my "guix home" configuration.

Guix Home does more than just start shepherd services. It is a system
for managing packages, configuration files, etc. If you haven't already,
I would suggest reading "(guix) Home Configuration" in the manual.

There isn't really anything that you can put into your Shepherd config
to execute your Home configuration. It goes the other way: instantiating
your Home config will start a Shepherd process.

I hope that helps,

Carlo