This repository is intended to be a sane, batteries-included starter template for running a LunarVim-powered NixOS development environment on WSL.

If you don't want to dig into NixOS too much right now, the only file you need to concern yourself with is home.nix. This is where you can add and remove binaries to your global $PATH.

Go to https://search.nixos.org to find the correct package names, though usually they will be what you expect them to be in other package managers.

unstable-packages is for packages that you want to always keep at the latest released versions, and stable-packages is for packages that you want to track with the current release of NixOS (currently 23.11).

If you want to update the versions of the available unstable-packages, run nix flake update to pull the latest version of the Nixpkgs repository and then apply the changes.

Make sure to look at all the FIXME notices in the various files which are intended to direct you to places where you may want to make configuration tweaks.

If you found this starter template useful, please consider sponsoring and subscribing to my YouTube channel.

This starter is a lightly-opinionated take on a productive terminal-driven development environment based on my own preferences. However, it is trivial to customize to your liking both by removing and adding tools that you prefer.

• The default editor is lvim
• win32yank is used to ensure perfect bi-directional copying and pasting to and from Windows GUI applications and LunarVim running in WSL
• The default shell is zsh
• Native docker (ie. Linux, not Windows) is enabled by default
• The prompt is Starship
• fzf, lsd, zoxide, and broot are integrated into zsh by default
  • These can all be disabled easily by setting enable = false in home.nix, or just removing the lines all together
• direnv is integrated into zsh by default
• git config is generated in home.nix with options provided to enable private HTTPS clones with secret tokens
• zsh config is generated in home.nix and includes git aliases, useful WSL aliases, and sensible$WORDCHARS

• Get the latest NixOS-WSL installer
• Install it (tweak the command to your desired paths):

wsl --import NixOS .\NixOS\ .\nixos-wsl.tar.gz --version 2

• Enter the distro:

wsl -d NixOS

• Set up a channel:

sudo nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-23.11 nixos
sudo nix-channel --update

• Get a copy of this repo (you'll probably want to fork it eventually):

nix-shell -p git neovim
git clone https://github.com/LGUG2Z/nixos-wsl-starter.git /tmp/configuration
cd /tmp/configuration

• Change the username to your desired username in flake.nix with nvim (or whichever editor you prefer)
• Apply the configuration

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake /tmp/configuration

• Restart and reconnect to the current WSL shell

wsl -t NixOS
wsl -d NixOS

• cd ~ and then pwd should now show /home/<YOUR_USERNAME>
• Move the configuration to your new home directory

mv /tmp/configuration ~/configuration

• Go through all the FIXME: notices in ~/configuration and make changes wherever you want
• Apply the configuration

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ~/configuration

Note: If developing in Rust, you'll still be managing your toolchains and components like rust-analyzer with rustup!

In order to keep the template as approachable as possible for new NixOS users, this project uses a flat layout without any nesting or modularization.

• flake.nix is where dependencies are specified
  • nixpkgs is the current release of NixOS
  • nixpkgs-unstable is the current trunk branch of NixOS (ie. all the latest packages)
  • home-manager is used to manage everything related to your home directory (dotfiles etc.)
  • nur is the community-maintained Nix User Repositories for packages that may not be available in the NixOS repository
  • nixos-wsl exposes important WSL-specific configuration options
  • nix-index-database tells you how to install a package when you run a command which requires a binary not in the $PATH
• wsl.nix is where the VM is configured
  • The hostname is set here
  • The default shell is set here
  • User groups are set here
  • WSL configuration options are set here
  • NixOS options are set here
• home.nix is where packages, dotfiles, terminal tools, environment variables and aliases are configured

This also helped.

Got vscode wsl remoting with NixOS to work. This is using the nix-ld approach

Version Info

Windows 11 22H2
WSL version 1.2.5.0
vscode 1.83.1 (user setup)
ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-0.81.8

Setup Instructions

• download latest release from https://github.com/nix-community/NixOS-WSL/releases
• import into wsl using wsl --import nixos . .\nixos-wsl.tar.gz --version 2
• update channel sudo nix-channel --update
• update nixos configs sudo nano /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

  wsl.extraBin = with pkgs; [
    { src = "${coreutils}/bin/uname"; }
    { src = "${coreutils}/bin/dirname"; }
    { src = "${coreutils}/bin/readlink"; }
  ];

  programs.nix-ld.enable = true;

  nix.settings.experimental-features = [ "nix-command" "flakes" ];

  environment.systemPackages = [
    pkgs.wget
  ];

• rebuild sudo nixos-rebuild switch
• shutodwn wsl from powershell wsl --shutdown and confirm shutdown wsl --list --running
• from nixos shell mkdir ~/.vscode-server & curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sonowz/vscode-remote-wsl-nixos/master/server-env-setup -o ~/.vscode-server/server-env-setup

• or for vscodium run mkdir ~/.vscodium-server & curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Voidlighter/vscodium-remote-wsl-nixos/master/server-env-setup -o ~/.vscodium-server/server-env-setup

• from vscode attempt to connect via wsl. Find NodeExecServer log message with how its being invoked

[2023-11-01 03:41:35.475] NodeExecServer run: C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe -d nixos sh -c '"$VSCODE_WSL_EXT_LOCATION/scripts/wslServer.sh" f1b07bd25dfad64b0167beb15359ae573aecd2cc stable code-server .vscode-server --host=127.0.0.1 --port=0 --connection-token=2218860889-3195581200-2104464773-1251764395 --use-host-proxy --without-browser-env-var --disable-websocket-compression --accept-server-license-terms --telemetry-level=all'

• take log message, modify slightly, and run

# note the changes to `wsl.exe -d nixos -e sh -l -c` and expanding the `$VSCODE_WSL_EXT_LOCATION`
C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe -d nixos -e sh -l -c '"/mnt/c/Users/Acelinkio/.vscode/extensions/ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-0.81.8/scripts/wslServer.sh" f1b07bd25dfad64b0167beb15359ae573aecd2cc stable code-server .vscode-server --host=127.0.0.1 --port=0 --connection-token=3823671665-1023682691-1766917102-882463176 --use-host-proxy --without-browser-env-var --disable-websocket-compression --accept-server-license-terms --telemetry-level=all'

• vscode wsl remoting now works....

Thoughts

Changing wslDaemon.js as mentioned https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code#Remote_WSL did nothing. My guess is that that file is versioned outside of the wsl extension. No amount of changing versions or restarting vscode helped. The underlying wsl remoting commands being executed did not respect any modifications.

Really would like to see this user experience improved. Most of this appears to have been caused by the VSCode WSL extension changes. Closest issue I could find is microsoft/vscode-remote-release#8305

cc @Atry @sonowz

To finish getting VSCodium to work, I had to reference this post and this comment:

After a while I managed to make the extension work with these changes:

1.Download the .vsix from https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl and install manually from the extensions section

2.In the file: C:\Users%USERNAME%.vscode-oss\extensions\ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-0.66.3\scripts\wslDownload.sh replace all "commit:$COMMIT" with "latest"

3.Open the extension And wait the download of the .vscodium-server within WSL user profile

4.In the file C:\Users%USERNAME%.vscode-oss\extensions\ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-0.66.3\scripts\wslServer.sh replace 'SERVER_APPNAME=$3' with 'SERVER_APPNAME="code-server"'

5.In the file \wsl$\Ubuntu%USERNAME%.vscodium-server\bin%COMIT_ID%\product.json replace the value of the "commit": with the same value of "commit": found in your %VSCODIUM_INSTALLATION_DIRECTORY%\VSCodium\resources\app\product.json

6.In the file \wsl$\Ubuntu%USERNAME%.vscodium-server\bin%COMIT_ID%\out\vs\server\node\server.main.js search "if(!ye){if(this._environmentService.isBuilt)return ie("Unauthorized client refused")" and change the first if condition from '!ye' to 'false'

Just as an update, on step 6, search for "Unauthorized client refused". There should be 2 instances, apply the fix to the second search result. The variable name changes in different versions, apparently (for me it was ve).

Except when trying to fix it I was about to do step 5 when suddenly it worked. Though, I had gone through all the steps before to get it to work the first time. It broke when I updated VSCodium. Shouldn't have done that apparently.