Rollbacks

When you perform a home-manager switch and discover a problem then it is possible to roll back to the previous version of your configuration using home-manager switch --rollback. This will turn the previous configuration into the current configuration.

:: {.example #ex-rollback-scenario}

Home Manager Rollback

Imagine you have just updated Nixpkgs and switched to a new Home Manager configuration. You discover that a package update included in your new configuration has a bug that was not present in the previous configuration.

You can then run home-manager switch --rollback to recover your previous configuration, which includes the working version of the package.

To see what happened above we can observe the list of Home Manager generations before and after the rollback:

$ home-manager generations
2024-01-04 11:56 : id 765 -> /nix/store/kahm1rxk77mnvd2l8pfvd4jkkffk5ijk-home-manager-generation (current)
2024-01-03 10:29 : id 764 -> /nix/store/2wsmsliqr5yynqkdyjzb1y57pr5q2lsj-home-manager-generation
2024-01-01 12:21 : id 763 -> /nix/store/mv960kl9chn2lal5q8lnqdp1ygxngcd1-home-manager-generation
2023-12-29 21:03 : id 762 -> /nix/store/6c0k1r03fxckql4vgqcn9ccb616ynb94-home-manager-generation
2023-12-25 18:51 : id 761 -> /nix/store/czc5y6vi1rvnkfv83cs3rn84jarcgsgh-home-manager-generation
…

$ home-manager switch --rollback
Starting home manager activation
…

$ home-manager generations
2024-01-04 11:56 : id 765 -> /nix/store/kahm1rxk77mnvd2l8pfvd4jkkffk5ijk-home-manager-generation
2024-01-03 10:29 : id 764 -> /nix/store/2wsmsliqr5yynqkdyjzb1y57pr5q2lsj-home-manager-generation (current)
2024-01-01 12:21 : id 763 -> /nix/store/mv960kl9chn2lal5q8lnqdp1ygxngcd1-home-manager-generation
2023-12-29 21:03 : id 762 -> /nix/store/6c0k1r03fxckql4vgqcn9ccb616ynb94-home-manager-generation
2023-12-25 18:51 : id 761 -> /nix/store/czc5y6vi1rvnkfv83cs3rn84jarcgsgh-home-manager-generation
…

:::