brew-nix

An experimental nix expression as a nixpkgs overlay to package all macOS Homebrew Casks automatically.

Benefits over nix-darwin's homebrew module

1. No homebrew installation needed; packages are fully managed by nix.
2. Pure nix, package derivations; everything is type checked and it will give you an error when you specify an invalid package for example.

Limitations/Flaws

1. Running most programs with nix run won't work, you'll have to build them first.
2. Some programs refuse to run from non-standard locations, since this is automatic there isn't a good way to fix it.
3. There're about 700 casks without hashes, so you have to override the derivation attributes & provide a hash explicitly.
4. Having several generations with this will take A LOT of disk space, so keep that in mind.

Related projects

• mac-app-util
• nixcasks

Usage examples

Basic usage

nix build github:BatteredBunny/brew-nix#blender
./result/Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender

or declaratively

home.packages = [ pkgs.brewCasks.visual-studio-code ];

Overriding cask's derivation attributes for casks with no hash

Many casks do not come with their hash so you'll have to provide one explicitly.

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  (brewCasks.marta.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
    src = pkgs.fetchurl {
      url = builtins.head oldAttrs.src.urls;
      hash = lib.fakeHash; # Replace with actual hash after building once
    };
  }))
];

Overriding cask's variation

Explicitly choose homebrew cask variations (Quite a few casks have variations for different architectures or macOS versions). You can look up each cask's respective variations at brew.sh.

home.packages = lib.attrsets.attrValues {
  vscode = (pkgs.brewCasks.visual-studio-code.override {variation = "sequoia";});
};

Overriding both cask's variation & derivation attributes

home.packages = lib.attrsets.attrValues {
  vscode = (pkgs.brewCasks.visual-studio-code.override {variation = "sequoia";}).overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
    src = pkgs.fetchurl {
      url = lib.lists.head oldAttrs.src.urls;
      hash = lib.fakeHash; # Replace with actual hash after building once
    };
  });
};

Setup

Setup with nix-darwin

See examples/flake.nix.

Setup with home-manager

# flake.nix
inputs = {
  brew-nix = {
    url = "github:BatteredBunny/brew-nix";
    inputs.brew-api.follows = "brew-api";
  };
  brew-api = {
    url = "github:BatteredBunny/brew-api";
    flake = false;
  };
};

# home.nix
nixpkgs = {
  overlays = [
    inputs.brew-nix.overlays.default
  ];
};

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  brewCasks.marta
  brewCasks."firefox@developer-edition" # Casks with special characters in their name need to be defined in quotes
];