Noshell is a simple shim that executes $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/shell as your login shell.
If you configure noshell system-wide, users can configure their login shell with
a simple ln -sT /path/to/zsh ~/.config/shell, instead of requiring
superuser permissions to modify /etc/shells.
By default, noshell checks the following locations in the order:
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/shell$HOME/.config/shellpkgs.bashInteractiveas the fallback. Can be configured at build-time
Add this flake's nixosModules.default to your NixOS imports, and set:
programs.noshell.enable = true
Noshell will be configured as the default shell to ALL users. You might want to
disable noshell for some user as a fallback, like users.users.root.shell = pkgs.bashInteractive;.
Noshell enables some patterns in the NixOS ecosystem, such as:
- Using a shell with a configuration wrapper. As the wrapper is a different program
that is not present in
/etc/shells. See https://github.com/viperML/wrapper-manager. - User-level configuration of the login shell with home-manager (
xdg.configFile."shell".source = lib.getExe pkgs.nushell;)
It can be useful too outside of NixOS, for example to use a custom build of some shell.
As far as I know, there is nothing "written in stone" about what a login shell must do, but other tools in Linux do expect some functionality.
Some of these assumptions are:
- The login shell is expected to
. /etc/profileby its own. This file is a POSIX sh script that sets up environment variables needed by the session.pam_envalso sets environment variables but that is handled earlier in the login process. loginmay call your shell with-progname, that is with a dash as the first character, to indicate that this is a login shell.- Other programs may call your shell with the argument
-lto indicate that it is a login shell. - Some programs might assume
$SHELLis something that you can pass arguments to, whatever the arguments are, with-c.
Please report any functionality expected from a login shell in the issues board: https://github.com/viperML/noshell/issues.