supported way of installing from configuration.nix

[bashfulrobot]

Hi there, just curious, do you have a supported way of installing from a nix expression (ie in configuration.nix)?

Thanks.

[woile]

Hi, I'm not sure how doable it is, How would that work? How would you expect it to behave?

[bashfulrobot]

Ultimately, the "right" way would likely be to package it for nixpkgs. I am fairly new, but I try to keep my entire system declarative.

I was just looking to get the app installed so I could leverage it.

[woile]

I'm also relatively new to nix. As I'm on mac, I've been using nix profile to manage packages, which stores the info of the packages on $HOME/.nix-profile/manifest.json. On mac there's no configuration.nix (I think unless you use nix-darwin).
I'm not sure how nix profiles and configuration.nix fit together 🤔
npt is just a wrapper around nix profile install and others.