| 12 Mar 2026 |
 axw | you can specify a target dir for each package | 23:14:35 |
 nasso | i read somewhere some people isolate homebrew with a separate user account, what does it look like in practice? is it like creating a user named brew or something and then setting up homebrew.user = "brew"? | 23:17:48 |
| nasso | oh neat!
what would the target dir look like to install a cask named foo for user alice only? | 23:19:40 |
| axw | see example conf here https://mynixos.com/nix-darwin/option/homebrew.casks | 23:28:01 |
| axw | {
name = "foo";
args = { appdir = "/Users/alice/Applications/
}
| 23:32:29 |
| axw | * {
name = "foo";
args = { appdir = "/Users/alice/Applications/"; };
}
| 23:35:32 |
| axw | in homebrew.casks = [] instead of just foo | 23:36:54 |
| axw | * in homebrew.casks = [] instead of just foo | 23:37:33 |
| 13 Mar 2026 |
| nasso | oooh thank you so much | 01:33:48 |
| nasso | ok so the idea is to literally put them in ~alice | 01:34:36 |
| nasso | didn't know that was possible! awesome | 01:34:51 |
| nasso | but then if i have a system with, say, users alice and bob, and i want to install cask foo for alice only, cask bar for bob only and cask baz for both
who should be the homebrew.user? thats the main thing im confused about rn because in my case neither alice nor bob stand out as the "main" user really, they're both sharing the same system but i wanna be able to do edit and update my nix-darwin config from both ideally (they're both admin) | 01:37:46 |
| nasso | but then if i have a system with, say, users alice and bob, and i want to install cask foo for alice only, cask bar for bob only and cask baz for both
who should be the homebrew.user? thats the main thing im confused about rn because in my case neither alice nor bob stand out as the "main" user really, they're both sharing the same system but i wanna be able to do edit and update my nix-darwin config from both ideally (they're both admin btw) | 01:37:49 |
| nasso | (i actually have the same question with system settings and system.primaryUser, it's unclear which one should be the "primaryUser" in this case... there isn't one!) | 01:38:52 |
 Sarah Clark | Home-manager isn't terribly hard and will be better for keeping a declaratrive system definition than using homebrew. You can search github for home-manager configurations | 03:15:49 |
 Randy Eckenrode | e.g., here’s mine: https://github.com/reckenrode/nixos-configs | 03:57:39 |
|  Nikhil Snow changed their display name from nikhil to Nikhil Snow. | 05:56:58 |
| nasso | oh cool thanks! i will look into it! | 09:32:39 |
 toonn | nasso: Re sharing packages between multiple users, you can probably just do a local binding somewhere `let sharedPackages = [ pkgs.package-a pkgs.package-b ]; in users.alice.packages = sharedPackages ++ [ pkgs.package-c ]; ...`. | 10:13:30 |
| nasso | yeah for regular nix packages that seems easy | 10:14:08 |
| nasso | i also realized shortly after asking my question that the same problem exists for mac app store apps lol
i dont even think macOS has a native way to install mac app store apps only for one user... that seems... sucky | 10:14:58 |
 emily | on a multi user system, don't set it | 11:30:18 |
| emily | Homebrew doesn't really support multiple installs unfortunately | 11:30:30 |
| nasso | yeah i had a feeling i wasn't supposed to set it at all in this case | 11:31:05 |
| emily | you can assign a dedicated Homebrew admin user or have an unsupported per-user installation (but nix-darwin wouldn't manage those and HM doesn't have anything for it AFAIK) | 11:31:11 |
| emily | combining nix-darwin and HM sounds like what you want l | 11:31:27 |
| emily | * | 11:31:34 |
| emily | probably with the HM integration module for nix-darwin | 11:31:46 |
| emily | shared stuff in nix-darwin, per-user in HM | 11:32:02 |
| nasso | how would homebrew fit in this | 11:32:09 |
