nixpkgs/nixos/doc/manual/development/meta-attributes.section.md

Meta Attributes

Like Nix packages, NixOS modules can declare meta-attributes to provide extra information. Module meta attributes are defined in the meta.nix special module.

meta is a top level attribute like options and config. Available meta-attributes are maintainers and doc.

Each of the meta-attributes must be defined at most once per module file.

{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }:
{
  options = {
    ...
  };

  config = {
    ...
  };

  meta = {
    maintainers = with lib.maintainers; [ ericsagnes ];
    doc = ./default.xml;
  };
}

• maintainers contains a list of the module maintainers.

• doc points to a valid DocBook file containing the module documentation. Its contents is automatically added to . Changes to a module documentation have to be checked to not break building the NixOS manual:

  $ nix-build nixos/release.nix -A manual.x86_64-linux