I'd also suggest that, once you _do_ feel comfortable enough to step foot into NixOS territory, that you start off by version-controlling your configuration. It doesn't necessarily have to be public, but I've found it very helpful in the past when I've had to debug various issues due to misconfiguration by me.
You don't have to specify the nixosConfiguration name (e.g ~/flake#my-configuration)? Do you just name it "default" or something for that to work? I've never tried that.
Exactly as Macha said, if you name the attribute `nixosConfiguration.<hostname>`, `nixos-rebuild` will look for that attribute implicitly; you can still specify another configuration if you're e.g. in a VM or a live image.
I use an update script that overrides that location to $(pwd), and also uses nvd to print a package diff for the update. Among a few other niceties. With flakes, that's a regular nixos-rebuild flag; otherwise it's an envvar.
/etc/nixos is just the default, there's a number of ways to set your own path. One of the simplest might be to put "import /home/wherever" as the sole contents of configuration.nix.
That sounds like a nice little workflow; I might have to incorporate something like that with `nvd`...
Though, it should be said that `import /home/wherever` might not work if you switch to / use flakes, as that is likely outside of the flake's git repo (and thus impure).
Yeah, I symlink `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` to my git repo. (I do keep a `hardware-configuration.nix` which isn't version controlled. I probably should add version-control at some point but for now it is simple enough to copy around and maybe make some minor tweaks).
You can also use `git init --separate-git-dir=~/something /etc/nixos` to keep the git data in your user directory while the config remains in the default location. I like this solution because it keeps the stuff I want to do as root (configuring the system) separate from what I want to do as regular user (tracking changes of the configuration).
