Core Concepts
Design Philosophy and Use Cases
Why Does Fleek Exist
Fleek is designed for people who are unfamiliar with Nix and are overwhelmed by its initial learning curve.
Fleek intentionally hides many of Nix’s aspects to provide one streamlined workflow: usage of Nix as a standard "package manager".
It searches, adds, removes, and updates packages and uses home-manager behind the scenes to manage that. And that’s it.
Users who want to continue on their Nix journey can later run fleek eject. Fleek will uncouple itself and leaves a pure Nix home-manager flake in it’s place that can be administered via the usual nix workflows.
Nix Philosophy
Nix is really awesome. Once you get the hang of it, you'll have a hard time going back to anything else. But, let's face it, the learning curve is steeper than other languages.
Fleek goes against the core declarative philosophy of Nix in a way, since it abstracts all that Nix power behind a CLI tool and some YAML. We think that's a good trade-off to help people get started with the best package manager we've found yet.
The Choice Is Not Binary
The Red Pill
You can use Fleek with the CLI and YAML configuration alone to manage most of the things you need in your environment:
- Installed Packages
- Paths
- Aliases
You can go beyond those options by making custom configuration changes in the user.nix file in your configuration directory. These changes will apply to all computers. And you can make changes specific to an individual computer in that computer's subdirectory, where there's another user.nix file just for that host. Those files will never be modified by Fleek, so they're a great place to add customization beyond what Fleek's simple YAML and CLI provide.
When you've grown beyond the simplicity of Fleek and you're ready for some serious customization, you can eject from Fleek. Once you run the fleek eject command, you're left with a Nix Home Manager flake that you can modify any way you'd like. Fleek removes itself from the equation leaving you with all the power of Nix.
The Blue Pill
Finally, you can use Fleek as a one-time generator to create a ready-to-use Nix Home Manager flake. This option generates a home-manager flake and gives you instructions on how to modify and activate it.
Get Fleek, and Get Productive
No matter which path you choose, we built Fleek to help you along your journey. If you have ideas or suggestions, open an issue on GitHub, we love all feedback.