Profiles

A profile is a composable feature toggle. Each one wires up a whole subsystem – the daemon, the user groups, the packages, and (for the desktop) the home-manager dotfiles – from a single line in your config.nix:

my.profiles.libvirt.enable = true;

You choose which profiles to switch on when you run setup host (the multi-select prompt), and you can enable or disable any of them later by editing ~/nixos/config.nix and re-applying with admin upgrade. There is no separate “minimal vs sway” install mode: a minimal server is simply a host with no profiles enabled, and every option – including the whole desktop – is one of these toggles.

The available profiles

• dotfiles – your shell/CLI home environment with no GUI: the sway-home bashrc, the ~/bin scripts, the ~/.config dotfiles, git config, emacs, the vm command’s setup, and the command-line package toolbox (ripgrep, fzf, bat, just, babashka, docker, kubectl, and so on). This is what you want on a headless server that you still live in over SSH.
• sway – the full Sway desktop: a Wayland login greeter, the Sway compositor, fonts, firefox, and the Wayland desktop package set (waybar, foot, rofi, grim, …). Enabling sway implies dotfiles, so a desktop gets the shell environment too – you don’t need to tick both.
• sound – PipeWire audio (ALSA + PulseAudio compatibility). Nothing else in sway-home enables sound, so a desktop that wants audio needs this.
• podman – Podman containers (Docker-compatible), with container DNS.
• flatpak – Flatpak with the Flathub remote pre-added, ready for flatpak install flathub <app>.
• libvirt – libvirt/KVM virtualization: virt-manager and the vm command (nixos-vm-template). It also adds your user to the libvirtd group.

Each profile is a module under nixos/modules/profiles/ in sway-home. They are always imported but do nothing until their flag is set, so enabling one never requires touching flake.nix.

Enabling a profile

The config.nix that setup host generated already lists every profile as a commented example. Open ~/nixos/config.nix and uncomment the one(s) you want:

# --- Profiles (sway-home) ---
# my.profiles.sway.enable    = true;   # Sway desktop
# my.profiles.sound.enable   = true;   # PipeWire audio
# my.profiles.podman.enable  = true;   # Podman containers (Docker-compatible)
# my.profiles.flatpak.enable = true;   # Flatpak + Flathub remote
my.profiles.libvirt.enable = true;     # <-- enabled

Then commit and apply:

git -C ~/nixos commit -am "Enable the libvirt profile"
admin upgrade

The Sway desktop

sway is the largest profile: enabling it is the difference between a headless server and a full graphical workstation. It turns on the system desktop (the Wayland login greeter and the Sway compositor) and your complete home-manager user environment.

my.profiles.sway.enable = true;

git -C ~/nixos commit -am "Enable the sway profile"
admin upgrade

This downloads and builds the desktop closure (the first build is large), enables the greetd login manager, and installs your home-manager environment. When it finishes, reboot to land on the graphical greeter; log in and you are in Sway.

Turning a profile off

Reverting is symmetric: set the flag back to false (or re-comment the line), commit, and admin upgrade. Because every profile is gated internally, disabling it removes everything it added. For sway that includes the dotfiles home-manager wrote into your home directory (~/.config/sway, the desktop scripts in ~/bin, and so on) – home-manager stays active and prunes what it no longer manages, so the next boot is a clean headless server again, with no leftovers to tidy by hand.