bug: home-manager activation fails due to empty manifest.json

[jheidbrink]

Are you following the right branch?

• My Nixpkgs and Home Manager versions are in sync

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Issue description

I use home-manager by including <home-manager/nixos> in my configuration.nix's imports. The home-manager-jan.service fails with

~: journalctl -u home-manager-jan.service --boot
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia systemd[1]: Starting Home Manager environment for jan...
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: Starting Home Manager activation
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: Activating checkFilesChanged
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: Activating checkLinkTargets
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: Activating writeBoundary
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: Activating installPackages
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1815]: warning: you don't have Internet access; disabling some network-dependent features
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1815]: error: [json.exception.parse_error.101] parse error at line 1, column 1: syntax error while parsing value - unexpected end of input; expected '[', '{', or a literal
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1819]: nix profile remove
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1837]: warning: you don't have Internet access; disabling some network-dependent features
Apr 28 11:45:55 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1837]: error: [json.exception.parse_error.101] parse error at line 1, column 1: syntax error while parsing value - unexpected end of input; expected '[', '{', or a literal
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1844]: warning: you don't have Internet access; disabling some network-dependent features
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1844]: error: [json.exception.parse_error.101] parse error at line 1, column 1: syntax error while parsing value - unexpected end of input; expected '[', '{', or a literal
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: Oops, Nix failed to install your new Home Manager profile!
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: Perhaps there is a conflict with a package that was installed using
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: "nix profile install"? Try running
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]:     nix profile list
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: and if there is a conflicting package you can remove it with
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]:     nix profile remove {number | store path}
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia hm-activate-jan[1586]: Then try activating your Home Manager configuration again.
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia systemd[1]: home-manager-jan.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia systemd[1]: home-manager-jan.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Apr 28 11:45:56 petrosilia systemd[1]: Failed to start Home Manager environment for jan.

I found that this is probably caused by an empty /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jan/profile/manifest.json. the profile folder is a symlink to profile-949-link. If I instead look at profile-948-link I find a manifest.json with actual contents there.

Maintainer CC

No response

System information

~: nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m"
 - system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 6.1.87, NixOS, 23.11 (Tapir), 23.11.6595.b500489fd3cf`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `yes`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.18.1`
 - channels(root): `"home-manager-23.11.tar.gz, nixos-23.11"`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos`

[jheidbrink]

I found that I also get this error with nix profile list:

nix profile list
error: [json.exception.parse_error.101] parse error at line 1, column 1: syntax error while parsing value - unexpected end of input; expected '[', '{', or a literal

[jheidbrink]

Not sure if this a home-manager issue. Anyway it seems people did encounter empty manifest.json before, and home-manager was at least involved:

NixOS/nixpkgs#18279
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/home-manager-stopped-working-on-my-non-nixos/6023