Keeping in sync (haus)

Once you’re set up, day-to-day life with nebelhaus runs through one command: haus. It wraps the Nix commands you’d otherwise type by hand — build, switch, update, roll back — with safe defaults.

haus vs. bench vs. wt

The haus on your PATH (documented here) manages your machine — it’s all you need as an end user. The rice also ships wt for Claude Code agent worktrees (useful to anyone, contributor or not), and family contributors get a separate bench CLI in the workshop for moving changes between repos. See the CLIs at a glance for the full map.

The everyday loop

Edit your config, then apply it:

haus edit       # open your host file in $EDITOR
# …make changes…
haus rebuild    # build first, then switch — a failed build never activates

haus rebuild always builds before switching, so a config with an error can’t take down your running system — you just see the build fail and fix it.

Staying current

The rice lives upstream. To pull new versions:

haus update     # bump the nebelhaus pin, then rebuild

This updates the flake.lock in ~/.config/nix to the latest nebelhaus and rebuilds in one step. Because inputs are pinned, nothing changes until you run this — your machine stays exactly as it was until you choose to move it.

When something goes wrong

haus rollback      # atomically return to the previous generation
haus generations   # list generations you can roll back to
haus doctor        # health check: Nix, Xcode CLT, GUI agents, cask drift

Every switch creates a new generation; rollback steps back to the last one instantly. For macOS settings (not packages), the APFS snapshot the installer took is your coarser rewind.

The full command set

Command	What it does
haus rebuild	Build, then switch — your everyday apply
haus update	Update the nebelhaus pin, then rebuild
haus rollback [N]	Return to the previous generation (or generation N)
haus generations	List available generations
haus status	Current generation and how stale the rice is
haus edit	Open your host file in $EDITOR
haus doctor	Diagnose Nix / CLT / agent health and cask drift
haus btm	On macOS Tahoe+, diagnose Background Task Management blocks on nix login items

From the palette, too

Pounce ships a Rebuild command — ⌘Space, type “rebuild” — that runs haus rebuild in a floating terminal, plus a “Nix Config” command that opens ~/.config/nix in your editor. Handy when your hands are already on the launcher.

Catching up on another machine

If you rebuild from a second Mac (or after shipping changes from elsewhere), just pull your config repo and rebuild:

cd ~/.config/nix && git pull
haus rebuild

Since everything is in git and pinned, the second machine converges to the exact same system.

For the deeper picture of why pins work this way, see How the flakes fit together.