Alex Spaulding's Dotfiles (Dendritic Nix)

Personal, declarative system configuration built by Alex Spaulding (aspauldingcode) using Nix Flakes.

Clone Location

Following the dendritic pattern, this repository should be cloned to the system configuration directory for your platform. The config is system-wide and shared across all users — editing requires admin privileges.

Platform	Path
NixOS	/etc/nixos/
macOS (nix-darwin)	/etc/nix-darwin/

# macOS
sudo git clone git@github.com:aspauldingcode/.dotfiles.git /etc/nix-darwin

# NixOS
sudo git clone git@github.com:aspauldingcode/.dotfiles.git /etc/nixos

Quick Install (macOS)

You can bootstrap this dotfiles configuration directly on a fresh macOS machine with Nix installed by running a single command.

The install script will automatically clone the repository to /etc/nix-darwin (or /etc/nixos on NixOS) and apply the system configuration. We use the tarball link so it works even if your brand-new Mac doesn't have git installed yet:

nix run github:aspauldingcode/.dotfiles#install

(Alternatively, if you have git installed and prefer to authenticate over SSH, you can run nix run git+ssh://git@github.com/aspauldingcode/.dotfiles.git#install)

Daily Usage

Once the system is installed, you can apply changes to your configuration using the nh (Nix Helper) CLI. The NH_FLAKE environment variable is automatically configured to point to the correct system directory.

# Navigate to your config
cd /etc/nix-darwin   # macOS
cd /etc/nixos        # NixOS

# Standard rebuild (uses the NH_FLAKE variable we configured)
nh darwin switch

# Manual rebuild (if variable is not yet active or you are on a new host)
nh darwin switch /etc/nix-darwin -H mba
nh os switch /etc/nixos -H my-nixos-host

Pro Tips for nh

• Use --ask to see a diff of what will change before confirming.
• Use --update to update all your flake inputs (packages) to their latest versions.
• The NH_FLAKE variable is set to /etc/nix-darwin#mba (macOS) or /etc/nixos (NixOS), so nh always knows which host to build by default.

Uninstallation

If you ever wish to remove nix-darwin and revert your system changes without removing Nix itself, run the following command:

nix run github:aspauldingcode/.dotfiles#uninstall

This will safely present a terminal UI to confirm, uninstall nix-darwin, delete all system generations, and garbage collect to free up space.