[Nix-dev] Re: Managing users, configuration files and filesystem mounts.

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from Jason Dusek's message of Fri Feb 05 19:42:48 +0100 2010:
> 2010/02/05 Ludovic Courtès <ludo at gnu.org>:
> > Jason Dusek <jason.dusek at gmail.com> writes:
> > > I am curious as to how Nix manages users and groups outside
> > > of NixOS.
> >
> > Normally, all users and groups are declared in NixOS.
> >
> > Users (actually sysadmins) can specify a list in the
> > ‘users.extraUsers’ attribute, in their ‘configuration.nix’.
> > Likewise, services provided by NixOS can declare
> > users/groups; for instance, the Avahi service declares that it
> > wants an ‘avahi’ user and group, so that ‘avahi-daemon’ can
> > run under that user.
> 
>   Where can I browse the NixOS specific packages? I poked around
>   under `http://nixos.org/releases/' but have not found them.

Get the nixpkgs tar.gz or SVN repository and use grep or gnu id utils.
This is best you can do. This way you won't miss anything.
(Or join ask here or on irc). If you already have nix installed you can
use nix-env to grep derivations by name.

We should add this feature to the homepage !

> > Does that answer your question?
> 
>   It sounds like users are managed in NixOS but when using Nix
>   overlayed with Ubuntu or something else, you must manage users
>   outside of Nix. Is that correct?

It depends. Of course MySQL, Apache users etc are created for you.
However doing a useradd -m name .. does work equally well.
It's not worth for some accounts adding them to NixOS because they may
be of temporary nature.

Marc Weber