LIRC

Enable LIRC support in the kernel

Currently (2018-07-23) the NixOS kernel is not compiled with LIRC support, therefore no /dev/lirc0 will appear when you add an IR receiver. To enable LIRC support for NixOS you will need to recompile your kernel with CONFIG_LIRC=y.

With NixOS the boot.kernelPatches option can be used:

{ lib, ... }:

{
  boot.kernelPatches = lib.singleton {
    name = "enable-lirc";
    patch = null;
    extraConfig = ''
      LIRC y
    '';
  };
}

LIRC Service

As of right now, no lirc service is provided by NixOS, You can start the LIRC Daemon manually like this:

$ lircd --listen -n  -P /var/run/lircd.pid  -o /var/run/lirc.sock -d /dev/lirc0

You can build upon this to create your own service with sytemd.services.

References

Discourse Discussion