Nixos-generate-config
Generate NixOS configuration modules.
This command is part of the nixos-install-tools package. It analyzes your hardware configuration and generates two files of:
/etc/nixos/configuration.nix- the main system configuration file./etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix- a hardware-specific configuration file, including detected devices and modules.
Usage
# nixos-generate-config
This will create configuration files based on the currently mounted system. This is typically used where NixOS is already installed. By default, nixos-generate-config will not overwrite an existing configuration.nix. To force overwrite an existing file, pass the --force option.
Generate configuration for a target root
To generate configuration files with a specific root directory (commonly used during installation):
# nixos-generate-config --root /mnt
This writes configuration files to /mnt/etc/nixos/.
Show hardware configuration
To print the detected hardware configuration to standard output without writing to disk:
# nixos-generate-config --show-hardware-config
Hardware specific notes
If you are using an SSD it may be useful to enable TRIM support as well as set filesystem flags to improve the SSD performance:
fileSystems."/".options = [ "noatime" "nodiratime" "discard" ];
A collection of hardware specific platforms with their config can be found at NixOS Hardware repository