Symlinks not getting cleaned when removed from the config with Home-Manager

[AdrienCos]

Hi ! Thanks a lot for this awesome project :)

Issue

I am currently setting up my secrets with sops-nix in my personal config, starting with Home-Manager, and using flakes, and I've ran into an issue when changing the sops.secrets.<secret>.path value:

• If I change the value to rename the symlink, the new symlink is properly created, but the old one is not cleaned up, and still points to the valid secret file
• If I remove the .path option from the secret but keep everything else the same, nothing changes on my system, the symlink is still there and points to the valid decrypted secret
• If I remove the config for the whole secret, again nothing changes: the symlink is still there, the secret still exists

Is this expected behavior, or is there some config that I may have missed somewhere ? Or is it a bug ?

Configuration excerpt :

The section of my flake that defines my HM config:

my-machine = home-manager.lib.homeManagerConfiguration {
        pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux;
        modules = [
          ./home.nix
          ./hosts/my-machine/home.nix # HM-specific host configuration
          catppuccin.homeManagerModules.catppuccin
          ./home-manager-modules
          ./modules
          sops-nix.homeManagerModules.sops
        ];
        extraSpecialArgs = {
          pkgs-unstable = nixpkgs-unstable.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux;
          pkgs-catppuccin-toolbox = inputs.catppuccin-toolbox.packages.x86_64-linux;
          hostname = host;
          inherit
            inputs
            ;
        };
      };

The sops-nix config inside my home.nix:

sops = {
  age.keyFile = "${config.home.homeDirectory}/.age/adrien_cosson.key";
  secrets.canary = {
    sopsFile = ./secrets/secrets.yaml;
    path = "${config.home.homeDirectory}/.sops_canary";
  };
};

Misc. Ideas

I have noticed an option named sops.keepGenerations that should apparently be in charge of doing some cleanup of old generations. eval-ing its value in my config returns me 1 (as expected, because I do not set it anywhere, and it's the default value). However, the fact that my secrets remain in place and decrypted after multiple HM generations makes me think that there is a bug somewhere.

Additional information:

• System: WSL on Windows 10
• OS: Ubuntu 24.04
• Home-Manager version : 24.05