Try a small Apple silicon system¶

The darwin template provides a neutral nix-darwin system with exact stable 26.05 pins. It manages Git, jq, a Zsh alias, and a harmless LaunchDaemon without requiring a personal account or any secret.

From the root checkout with initialized submodules:

example_dir=$(mktemp -d)
repo=$PWD
cd "$example_dir"
nix flake init --template "git+file://$repo?submodules=1#darwin"
nix build --no-write-lock-file .#checks.aarch64-darwin.system
nix build --no-write-lock-file .#checks.aarch64-darwin.generated-config

Run these builds on Apple silicon with Nix installed. They do not activate the configuration. Read the extracted README.md and configuration.nix before adapting or activating anything. The example deliberately leaves ownership of the existing Nix daemon with its installer.

The generated-config check parses the real Zsh and launchd output and executes the pinned daemon command. It does not register a launchd job. Loading the job, opening a new shell, activation, and rollback require a separate attended macOS check. Linux can evaluate the system derivation but cannot establish those native results. Intel macOS is outside the declared target set.

See public consumer checks for candidate template extraction and the distinction between stable examples and current workstation module consumers.