nixos-infect

Similarly, I've used a project called nixos-infect(1) to install NixOS on cloud providers that don't natively offer it. It's worked well on the handful of boxes I've ran it on. (1): https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect

I think they're referring to this implementation: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere but cleverca22's work is solid as well there's also the earlier https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect and the built-in NIXOS_LUSTRATE: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-installing-from-o... I'd go with nixos-anywhere, personally

There is one solution I've seen being used to solve this issue. It is to overwrite the current Linux OS with the one you want. I came across this idea here [0]. I researched and got Alpine Linux running on Hetzner (even they don't support custom images) using a similar method [1]. This seems to be the guide to do the same with Arch Linux [2], I'm not sure though. Once you do create a successful Arch image on OVH, take a snapshot of the machine before installing anything else, in case you want to start from a fresh Arch image in the future. [0] https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect [1] https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Replacing_non-Alpine_Linux... [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Install_Arch_Linux_from_exi...

Related: https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/u5gi6e/whats_a_good_... https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect https://tornadovps.com/documentation/nixos https://github.com/dalisoft/awesome-hosting

FWIW, I recently found a VPS offering for $1.41/month (!) @ 1.5GB RAM & 30GB HDD via https://lowendbox.com/, at https://my.racknerd.com/index.php?rp=/store/black-friday-202... (please note I have no idea how reliable it is though!). I managed to deploy NixOS there through nixos-infect (https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect), and then further configure it with NixOps. That said, using NixOps does currently require a Linux (or Mac, probably) box as the managing one, and some Nix-fu, which is definitely non-trivial. A draft (WIP) writeup on that, if you're interested: https://github.com/akavel/scribbles/blob/main/_drafts/202308...

Those Linode instructions are about installing an OS from an installation ISO from Linode's rescue mode. -- I'd consider that more a 'plus' to Linode that you get to be able to install whatever unsupported Linux on Linode's VMs. But, of course it's not as smooth as the officially supported images. Sibling comment mentions that nix has ways to build NixOS VM images (e.g. https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators has a generator specifically for Linode). Another option is to use nixos-infect, which will replace a Linux distribution with a NixOS distribution. https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect -- e.g. this blogpost discusses using nixos-infect to deploy NixOS for a cloud provider which doesn't have an official NixOS image. https://xeiaso.net/blog/nix-flakes-terraform > At that point, I feel like all of the repeatability gains are

Without a sweat, I recently changed from Ubuntu to NixOS on a server I have access to only via SSH (so mounting an ISO wasn't an option) using[0], so the switch happens live(!) and when you reboot you end up in NixOS. I've also done it to CentOS 7.5, but manually via[1]. It was the case here that backups were not necessary, but it's pretty incredible what's possible when the system configuration is declarative and only /nix and /boot are needed by NixOS to boot. I highly recommend people new to running servers to try NixOS. [0] https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect [1] https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/unstable/index.html#sec-insta...

Have you tried https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect ? Works like a charm (with DO). It's a oneliner, you don't need to fiddle with anything. If it won't work from the user config option, just paste it in the live VPS and it will rebuild itself.

Have you seen https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect ? It allows you to easily re-create/infect existing distros into NixOS. Super helpful, works as a charm (tested on DO).

https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect is similar but doesn't require to pivot root.