wpa_supplicant

General

wpa_supplicant can be enabled on NixOS with networking.wireless.enable = true.

Extra configuration can be specified inside networking.wireless.extraConfig.

wpa_supplicant_gui

To be able to use wpa_gui or wpa_cli as user put the following in your configuration.nix file:

networking.wireless.userControlled.enable = true;

Also your user must be part of the wheel group (replace USER with your username):

users.extraUsers.USER.extraGroups = [ "wheel" ];

Using wpa_supplicant from within the configuration file

You can configure your networks with the option networks. You have to fill the name(s) of your wifi(s) after the option and the preshared-key(s) (usually called psk). If you do not want to have your secret key in plaintext, you can use pskRaw, generated with wpa_passphrase SSID password. An example of using networks :

networking.wireless.networks.Wifi_name.pskRaw = "pskRaw generated";

If you have multiple networks, and you want to set the priority, you can use networking.wireless.networks.Wifi_name.priority = <value>;

Switching Network

From the shell terminal, use the wpa_cli command line tool and specify the network interface device with -g

wpa_cli -g /run/wpa_supplicant/wlp3s0
list_network
select_network 2

As a means to debug if things are working, open another terminal and examine the logs by:

journalctl -u wpa_supplicant -f

Mac spoofing

Since there is no option to randomize your mac address for wpa supplicant, you can instead create your own service using GNU's macchanger:

systemd.services.macchanger = {
	enable = true;
	description = "macchanger on %I";
	wants = [ "network-pre.target" ];
	before = [ "network-pre.target" ];
	bindsTo = [ "sys-subsystem-net-devices-%i.device" ];
	after = [ "sys-subsystem-net-devices-%i.device" ];
	wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
	serviceConfig = {
		Type = "oneshot";
		ExecStart = "${pkgs.macchanger}/bin/macchanger -r %I";
	};
};

This obviously requires you to have the macchanger package installed.

External links

(german) article eduroam meets NixOS (with configuration) (instance University of Applied Sciences Dresden: The eduroam installer for GNU/Linux works for example for Ubuntu but not NixOS)