Guides and Recipes overview

This tracking issue is to keep an overview of guides for most common use cases.

• Dependency management with npins (with Home Manager)
• Automatic environments with direnv (with Home Manager)
• Package scaffolding (with nix-init)
• Building a bootable NixOS ISO image
• Running pre-built binaries on NixOS
• https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/issues/463
• https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/issues/490
• Managing secrets (no optimal solution)
• https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/issues/731
• https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/issues/907 (no optimal solution)

Guides should complement the tutorials, and should be quite short. They can even duplicate important topics to have a condensed form for quick lookup. Related: https://github.com/NixOS/nix.dev/issues/910

A good example is the guide on sharing dependencies with shell.nix. It starts with a very small sample to show the pattern (which requires some proficiency with the Nix language to grasp quickly), and expands on the details below the fold.

Start with the existing guide at guides/recipes/sharing-dependencies and compare its short, example-first structure with the checklist in this issue. Review linked issues 463, 490, 731, 907, and 910 to identify their intended guide scope. Done means the selected common-use-case guides are written and the checklist is updated.