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Guidelines

If your contribution satisfy the following rules then there is a good chance it will be merged without too much trouble. The rules are enforced by the Home Manager maintainers and to a lesser extent the Home Manager CI system.

If you are uncertain how these rules affect the change you would like to make then feel free to start a discussion in the #home-manager IRC channel, ideally before you start developing.

Maintain backward compatibility

Your contribution should not cause another user’s existing configuration to break unless there is a very good reason and the change should be announced to the user through an assertion or similar.

Remember that Home Manager is used in many different environments and you should consider how your change may effect others. For example,

  • Does your change work for people that do not use NixOS? Consider other GNU/Linux distributions and macOS.

  • Does your change work for people whose configuration is built on one system and deployed on another system?

Keep forward compatibility in mind

The master branch of Home Manager tracks the unstable channel of Nixpkgs, which may update package versions at any time. It is therefore important to consider how a package update may affect your code and try to reduce the risk of breakage.

The most effective way to reduce this risk is to follow the advice in Add only valuable options.

Add only valuable options

When creating a new module it is tempting to include every option supported by the software. This is strongly discouraged. Providing many options increases maintenance burden and risk of breakage considerably. This is why only the most important software options should be modeled explicitly. Less important options should be expressible through an extraConfig escape hatch.

A good rule of thumb for the first implementation of a module is to only add explicit options for those settings that absolutely must be set for the software to function correctly. It follows that a module for software that provides sensible default values for all settings would require no explicit options at all.

If the software uses a structured configuration format like a JSON, YAML, INI, TOML, or even a plain list of key/value pairs then consider using a settings option as described in Nix RFC 42.

These guidelines describe the minimum option design requirements. Before submitting a module, compare it against the upstream documentation or source code and verify that the generated files, services, environment variables, and command line arguments all match the upstream behavior you intend to expose.

If a module installs a package, try to make the package option nullable, for example

package = lib.mkPackageOption pkgs "xdg-terminal-exec" { nullable = true; };

This lets users keep installation outside Home Manager, for example via apt or because the program is built into macOS, while still using the module for configuration. Keeping the package non-nullable is fine when the enabled behavior structurally requires the executable or when package-less support would make the module significantly more complex.

Avoid generating files for empty settings, null packages, or optional features that are not configured.

If upstream does not use XDG paths by default but supports changing the configuration location with an environment variable, for example FOO_HOME, expose a configDir option and use it to respect home.preferXdgDirectories.

Add relevant tests

If at all possible, make sure to add new tests and expand existing tests so that your change will keep working in the future. See Tests for more information about the Home Manager test suite.

All contributed code must pass the test suite.

Add relevant documentation

Many code changes require changing the documentation as well. The documentation is written in Nixpkgs-flavoured Markdown. All text is hosted in Home Manager’s Git repository.

The HTML version of the manual containing both the module option descriptions and the documentation of Home Manager can be generated and opened by typing the following in a shell within a clone of the Home Manager Git repository:

$ nix-build -A docs.html
$ xdg-open ./result/share/doc/home-manager/index.html

When you have made changes to a module, it is a good idea to check that the man page version of the module options looks good:

$ nix-build -A docs.manPages
$ man ./result/share/man/man5/home-configuration.nix.5

Module Auto-importing

Home Manager automatically imports all modules from the modules/programs/ and modules/services/ directories. This auto-importing behavior follows these rules:

  • Nix files: All .nix files in these directories are automatically imported
  • Directories: All subdirectories are automatically imported (typically containing a default.nix file)
  • Exclusions: Files and directories starting with an underscore (_) are excluded from auto-importing

This allows for flexible module organization:

modules/programs/
├── git.nix              # Single-file module (imported)
├── firefox/             # Multi-file module (imported)
│   ├── default.nix
│   └── addons.nix
├── _experimental.nix    # Excluded (starts with _)
└── _wip/                # Excluded directory (starts with _)
    └── newfeature.nix

When adding a new module, simply place it in the appropriate directory (programs/ for user programs, services/ for user services) and it will be automatically discovered and included in the Home Manager module system.

Add yourself as a module maintainer

Every new module must include a named maintainer using the meta.maintainers attribute. If you are a user of a module that currently lacks a maintainer then please consider adopting it.

If you are present in the nixpkgs maintainer list then you can use that entry. If you are not then you can add yourself to modules/lib/maintainers.nix in the Home Manager project.

As a maintainer you are expected to respond to issues and pull-requests associated with your module.

Maintainers are encouraged to join the IRC or Matrix channel and participate when they have opportunity.

Format your code

Make sure your code is formatted as described in Code Style. To maintain consistency throughout the project you are encouraged to browse through existing code and adopt its style also in new code.

Format your commit messages

Similar to Format your code we encourage a consistent commit message format as described in Commits.

Format your news entries

If your contribution includes a change that should be communicated to users of Home Manager then you can add a news entry. The entry must be formatted as described in News.

When new modules are added a news entry should be included.

News entries and release notes serve different purposes. Release notes should be updated separately when a change affects users migrating between stable releases, such as state version default changes, required migration steps, or broad behavior changes. See Release Notes and News for more details.

Use conditional modules and news

Home Manager includes a number of modules that are only usable on some of the supported platforms. The most common example of platform specific modules are those that define systemd user services, which only works on Linux systems.

If you add a module that is platform specific then make sure the module guards platform-specific configuration with an appropriate condition, for example pkgs.stdenv.hostPlatform.isLinux or pkgs.stdenv.hostPlatform.isDarwin. Modules in modules/programs/ and modules/services/ are auto-imported, so the platform condition should live in the module behavior and in any platform-specific tests rather than in a separate module discovery call.

Similarly, if you are adding a news entry then it should be shown only to users that may find it relevant, see News for a description of conditional news.

Mind the license

The Home Manager project is covered by the MIT license and we can only accept contributions that fall under this license, or are licensed in a compatible way. When you contribute self written code and documentation it is assumed that you are doing so under the MIT license.

A potential gotcha with respect to licensing are option descriptions. Often it is convenient to copy from the upstream software documentation. When this is done it is important to verify that the license of the upstream documentation allows redistribution under the terms of the MIT license.

Commits

The commits in your pull request should be reasonably self-contained, that is, each commit should make sense in isolation. In particular, you will be asked to amend any commit that introduces syntax errors or similar problems even if they are fixed in a later commit.

Keep commits atomic and separated by concern. For example, a new maintainer entry should be a separate first commit, and a shared module should be committed separately from integrations in existing modules. Pull requests should not include merge commits or fixup commits.

The commit messages should follow the seven rules, except for "Capitalize the subject line". We also ask you to include the affected code component or module in the first line. That is, a commit message should follow the template

{component}: {description}

{long description}

where {component} refers to the code component (or module) your change affects, {description} is a very brief description of your change, and {long description} is an optional clarifying description. As a rare exception, if there is no clear component, or your change affects many components, then the {component} part is optional. See example_title for a commit message that fulfills these requirements.

Example commit

The commit 69f8e47e9e74c8d3d060ca22e18246b7f7d988ef contains the commit message


    starship: allow running in Emacs if vterm is used

    The vterm buffer is backed by libvterm and can handle Starship prompts
    without issues.

which ticks all the boxes necessary to be accepted in Home Manager.

Finally, when adding a new module, say programs/foo.nix, we use the fixed commit format foo: add module. You can, of course, still include a long description if you wish.

Code Style

The code in Home Manager is formatted by the treefmt tool and the formatting is checked in the pull request tests. Run nix fmt or treefmt (with required formatters which can be found in treefmt.toml in your $PATH) inside the project repository before submitting your pull request.

Keep lines at a reasonable width, ideally 80 characters or less. This also applies to string literals.

We prefer lowerCamelCase for variable and attribute names with the accepted exception of variables directly referencing packages in Nixpkgs which use a hyphenated style. For example, the Home Manager option services.gpg-agent.enableSshSupport references the gpg-agent package in Nixpkgs.