Include home environment in image

Include home environment in image

[Lars Rustand]

Hi, how can I include a home environment in an image or vm created with
`guix system image` or `guix system vm`?

Re: Include home environment in image

[Kristoffer Ström]

Lars Rustand <rustand.lars@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi, how can I include a home environment in an image or vm created with
> `guix system image` or `guix system vm`?

I would love to know this as well. I've not found any examples in the
wild that are not tied into other distributions (RDE).

Re: Include home environment in image

[Lars Rustand]

Kristoffer Ström <kristoffer@rymdkoloni.se> writes:

> I would love to know this as well. I've not found any examples in the
> wild that are not tied into other distributions (RDE).

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! After doing some digging
in RDE sources I found the `guix-home-service-type` which does exactly
what I want. Using it is as simple as adding RDE as a channel and adding
the following to your system config:

(use-modules (gnu services home))
...
(service guix-home-service-type
         `(,(cons
             "my-user"
             %my-home-environment)))

The service definition even seems to be fully self-contained and not
dependent on any other RDE code, so it should be possible to simply copy
the service definition into your own config without needing to add RDE
at all (although I have not tried this myself).

Maybe this could even be upstreamed into Guix proper? I think this would
be a very valuable addition.

Re: Include home environment in image

[Richard]

Lars Rustand <rustand.lars@gmail.com> writes:

> Kristoffer Ström <kristoffer@rymdkoloni.se> writes:
>
> The service definition even seems to be fully self-contained and not
> dependent on any other RDE code, so it should be possible to simply copy
> the service definition into your own config without needing to add RDE
> at all (although I have not tried this myself).
>
> Maybe this could even be upstreamed into Guix proper? I think this would
> be a very valuable addition.

+1 for upstreaming if possible. Being able to associate home
environments with a system declaration would be very helpful. I remember
someone asking about guix deploy and home environments, so it seems to
be a popular feature request.

There are edge cases where the two need to be kept in sync. (e.g.
StumpWM. The package needs to be added at a system level so login
managers see it, but configuration needs to be in the user's home.
Upgrade the system package with a new SCBL version without upgrading
your home and StumpWM will complain about compiled files being for the
wrong version.)

Re: Include home environment in image

[Lars Rustand]

Richard <richard@freakingpenguin.com> writes:

> +1 for upstreaming if possible. Being able to associate home
> environments with a system declaration would be very helpful. I remember
> someone asking about guix deploy and home environments, so it seems to
> be a popular feature request.

This reminds me of an idea I've had for some time. It would be nice to
have a separate deploy command to be able to remotely deploy only a home
config. So instead of running `guix deploy system.scm` you could do
`guix deploy-home home.scm`.

> There are edge cases where the two need to be kept in sync. (e.g.
> StumpWM. The package needs to be added at a system level so login
> managers see it, but configuration needs to be in the user's home.
> Upgrade the system package with a new SCBL version without upgrading
> your home and StumpWM will complain about compiled files being for the
> wrong version.)

Nice to see a fellow StumpWM user! I have some questions regarding how
to manage loading of asdf dependencies from a read-only filesystem, but I
might start a new thread for this.