Setting Up Wireless Networking with NixOS

The current NixOS Manual is a little sparse on details for different options to configure wireless networking. The version in master is a little better but still ambiguous. I've made a pull request to resolve this but in the interim, this documents how to configure a number of wireless scenarios with NixOS.

If you're going to use NetworkManager, this is not for you. This is for those of us who want reproducible configurations.

To enable a wireless connection with no spaces or special characters in the name that uses a pre-shared key, you first need to generate the raw PSK:

$ wpa_passphrase exampleSSID abcd1234
network={
        ssid="exampleSSID"
        #psk="abcd1234"
        psk=46c25aa68ccb90945621c1f1adbe93683f884f5f31c6e2d524eb6b446642762d
}

Now you can add the following stanza to your configuration.nix to enable wireless networking and this specific wireless connection:

networking.wireless = {
  enable = true;
  userControlled.enable = true;
  networks = {
    exampleSSID = {
      pskRaw = "46c25aa68ccb90945621c1f1adbe93683f884f5f31c6e2d524eb6b446642762d";
    };
  };
};

If you had another WiFi connection that had spaces and/or special characters in the name, you would configure it like this:

networking.wireless = {
  enable = true;
  userControlled.enable = true;
  networks = {
    "example's SSID" = {
      pskRaw = "46c25aa68ccb90945621c1f1adbe93683f884f5f31c6e2d524eb6b446642762d";
    };
  };
};

If you need to connect to a hidden network, you would do it like this:

networking.wireless = {
  enable = true;
  userControlled.enable = true;
  networks = {
    myHiddenSSID = {
      hidden = true;
      pskRaw = "46c25aa68ccb90945621c1f1adbe93683f884f5f31c6e2d524eb6b446642762d";
    };
  };
};

The final scenario that I have, is connecting to open SSIDs that have some kind of secondary method (like a login in web page) for authentication of connections:

networking.wireless = {
  enable = true;
  userControlled.enable = true;
  networks = {
    FreeWiFi = {};
  };
};

This is all fairly straight forward but was non-trivial to find the answers too.