Fixing macos spotlight and alfred indexing of home manager apps.

README.md

I spent two days on this, because I did not want to:

1. Copy the apps
2. Use trampolines.
3. Aliases (because they do not show up as applications).
4. Wrapper scripts (because I got weird rosetta prompts).

The issues seems to be the symlinks.

What worked for me was a hybrid approach. I copy the Info.plist and the icon and symlink the rest.

Claude.ai was friendly enough to give me some code for this that worked (modulo some manual fixes).

home.nix

{ pkgs, config, lib, ... }:

{
  imports = [
    ./macos-apps-fix.nix
  ];
}

macos-apps-fix.nix

{ pkgs, config, lib, ... }:

{
    # Need to copy the apps because otherwise spotlight does not find them.
  home.activation = {
    copyNixApps = lib.hm.dag.entryAfter ["linkGeneration"] ''
        # Create directory for the applications
        mkdir -p "$HOME/Applications/Nix-Apps"

        # Remove old entries
        rm -rf "$HOME/Applications/Nix-Apps"/*

        # Get the target of the symlink
        NIXAPPS=$(readlink -f "$HOME/.nix-profile/Applications")

        # For each application
        for app_source in "$NIXAPPS"/*; do
          if [ -d "$app_source" ] || [ -L "$app_source" ]; then
              appname=$(basename "$app_source")
              target="$HOME/Applications/Nix-Apps/$appname"
              
              # Create the basic structure
              mkdir -p "$target"
              mkdir -p "$target/Contents"
              
              # Copy the Info.plist file
              if [ -f "$app_source/Contents/Info.plist" ]; then
                mkdir -p "$target/Contents"
                cp -f "$app_source/Contents/Info.plist" "$target/Contents/"
              fi
              
              # Copy icon files
              if [ -d "$app_source/Contents/Resources" ]; then
                mkdir -p "$target/Contents/Resources"
                find "$app_source/Contents/Resources" -name "*.icns" -exec cp -f {} "$target/Contents/Resources/" \;
              fi
              
              # Symlink the MacOS directory (contains the actual binary)
              if [ -d "$app_source/Contents/MacOS" ]; then
                ln -sfn "$app_source/Contents/MacOS" "$target/Contents/MacOS"
              fi
              
              # Symlink other directories
              for dir in "$app_source/Contents"/*; do
                dirname=$(basename "$dir")
                if [ "$dirname" != "Info.plist" ] && [ "$dirname" != "Resources" ] && [ "$dirname" != "MacOS" ]; then
                  ln -sfn "$dir" "$target/Contents/$dirname"
                fi
              done
            fi
            done
    '';
  };
}

This didn't work for me initially, I'm not sure why, but I found that I was able to fix it by pointing to the correct home-manager path for my system, rather than the system nix profile path in this example. Thank you @Jabb0 for this fix, been trying to resolve this for a while now and yours is the first solution that's allowed it to work with spotlight for me.

Here's the changes I made

-        # Get the target of the symlink
-        NIXAPPS=$(readlink -f "$HOME/.nix-profile/Applications")
+        # Get the target of the symlink from home-manager
+        NIXAPPS="$newGenPath/home-path/Applications"`

this bit is just naming as I believe home manager is creating a symlink that points to the source in nix store and that's what I'm looping through here

-        for app_source in "$NIXAPPS"/*; do
-          if [ -d "$app_source" ] || [ -L "$app_source" ]; then
+        for app_link in "$NIXAPPS"/*; do
+          if [ -d "$app_link" ] || [ -L "$app_link" ]; then
+              # Resolve the symlink to get the actual app in the nix store
+              app_source=$(readlink -f "$app_link")

Here is my full macos-app-fix.nix file

{
  pkgs,
  config,
  lib,
  ...
}:

{
  # Need to copy the apps because otherwise spotlight does not find them.
  home.activation = {
    copyNixApps = lib.hm.dag.entryAfter [ "linkGeneration" ] ''
      # Create directory for the applications
      mkdir -p "$HOME/Applications/Nix Apps"
      # Remove old entries
      rm -rf "$HOME/Applications/Nix Apps"/*
      # Get the target of the symlink from home-manager
      NIXAPPS="$newGenPath/home-path/Applications"
      # For each application
      for app_link in "$NIXAPPS"/*; do
        if [ -d "$app_link" ] || [ -L "$app_link" ]; then
            # Resolve the symlink to get the actual app in the nix store
            app_source=$(readlink -f "$app_link")
            appname=$(basename "$app_source")
            target="$HOME/Applications/Nix Apps/$appname"
            
            # Create the basic structure
            mkdir -p "$target"
            mkdir -p "$target/Contents"
            
            # Copy the Info.plist file
            if [ -f "$app_source/Contents/Info.plist" ]; then
              mkdir -p "$target/Contents"
              cp -f "$app_source/Contents/Info.plist" "$target/Contents/"
            fi
            
            # Copy icon files
            if [ -d "$app_source/Contents/Resources" ]; then
              mkdir -p "$target/Contents/Resources"
              find "$app_source/Contents/Resources" -name "*.icns" -exec cp -f {} "$target/Contents/Resources/" \;
            fi
            
            # Symlink the MacOS directory (contains the actual binary)
            if [ -d "$app_source/Contents/MacOS" ]; then
              ln -sfn "$app_source/Contents/MacOS" "$target/Contents/MacOS"
            fi
            
            # Symlink other directories
            for dir in "$app_source/Contents"/*; do
              dirname=$(basename "$dir")
              if [ "$dirname" != "Info.plist" ] && [ "$dirname" != "Resources" ] && [ "$dirname" != "MacOS" ]; then
                ln -sfn "$dir" "$target/Contents/$dirname"
              fi
            done
          fi
          done
    '';
  };
}

@motion5 amazing. Glad it helped!