home manager not following user channel

[shreyanshk]

Hi,
I'm new to home-manager and to NixOS in general. Please pardon me if I am missing anything.
I'm following the unstable channel for my user profile.

$ nix-channel --list
nixuns https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable

BUT stable channel for the root/system profile

# nix-channel --list
nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-18.03

I've installed homemanager with nix-env

# nix-env -iA nixuns.home-manager

My ~/.config/nixpkgs/home.nix file is as follows:

{pkgs, ... }: {
        home.packages = with pkgs; [
                aria2
                beets
                firefox
                go
                hexchat
                htop
                libreoffice
                neovim-qt
                qsyncthingtray
                tldr
                vlc
                youtube-dl
        ];

        programs.git = {
                enable = true;
                userName = "<Username>";
                userEmail = "<email>";
        };

        programs.home-manager.enable = true;
}

However, when I generate my profile with home-manage, the packages are installed from the stable branch.
I think home-manager should use the same branch used by nix-env for building user profile packages.
I know this because home-manager, for example, installs libreoffice-fresh version 6.0.2.1 (which is from stable branch) and not 6.1.0.3 (which is available in unstable branch).
Another example is Go compiler. Version 1.10.1 is installed from stable but not 1.11 which is available in unstable which I'm following.

[rycee]

Home Manager always uses <nixpkgs> for the package set. If you want to override this you can use the -I option along the lines of

$ home-manager -I nixpkgs=/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/$USER/channels/nixuns switch

I'm not completely certain this will be the precise path to the channel directory but it should be something like it. You can probably also find it under ~/.nix-defexpr/channels/.

[shreyanshk]

Would it be possible to accommodate for this in the home.nix file?

[rycee]

Sorry, no that's not possible because the package set needs to be loaded before home.nix.

…

On September 9, 2018 6:32:07 AM GMT+03:00, Shreyansh Khajanchi ***@***.***> wrote: Would it be possible to accommodate for this in the home.nix file? -- You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #376 (comment)

-- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[rycee]

Did this solution work for you?

Typically in such situations I would create a shell alias along the lines of

alias hm='home-manager -I nixpkgs=/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/$USER/channels/nixuns'

And use the command hm switch instead (which also is faster to type 😉).

[shreyanshk]

Yes!
That should be good enough.

Thank you.

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/selective-upgrading-of-packages-in-home-manager/9436/2

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-and-home-manager-where-is-my-profile/23260/2