I use an update script that overrides that location to $(pwd), and also uses nvd to print a package diff for the update. Among a few other niceties. With flakes, that's a regular nixos-rebuild flag; otherwise it's an envvar.

/etc/nixos is just the default, there's a number of ways to set your own path. One of the simplest might be to put "import /home/wherever" as the sole contents of configuration.nix.

That sounds like a nice little workflow; I might have to incorporate something like that with `nvd`...

Though, it should be said that `import /home/wherever` might not work if you switch to / use flakes, as that is likely outside of the flake's git repo (and thus impure).

Yeah, I symlink `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` to my git repo. (I do keep a `hardware-configuration.nix` which isn't version controlled. I probably should add version-control at some point but for now it is simple enough to copy around and maybe make some minor tweaks).

You can actually put your NixOS config anywhere. Assuming you're not using flakes, `nixos-rebuild` finds the config through NIX_PATH:

grahamc@scruffy:~/ > echo $NIX_PATH

nixpkgs=/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos:nixos-config=/etc/nixos/configuration.nix:/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels

you can change the `nixos-config` value to point to somewhere else, or call it like this:`nixos-rebuild -I nixos-config=./configuration.nix`

I don't; my config lives in ~/flake, and I run `nixos-rebuild ... --flake ~/flake` whenever I update it.

You don't have to specify the nixosConfiguration name (e.g ~/flake#my-configuration)? Do you just name it "default" or something for that to work? I've never tried that.

You name it the same as your current system's hostname.

Oh, I had no idea. I was actually already doing that. Guess I was just being extra verbose on the command line.

Exactly as Macha said, if you name the attribute `nixosConfiguration.<hostname>`, `nixos-rebuild` will look for that attribute implicitly; you can still specify another configuration if you're e.g. in a VM or a live image.

You can also use `git init --separate-git-dir=~/something /etc/nixos` to keep the git data in your user directory while the config remains in the default location. I like this solution because it keeps the stuff I want to do as root (configuring the system) separate from what I want to do as regular user (tracking changes of the configuration).