disko

> Note that the author used disko to partition the disk declaratively. Disko won't work for a machine with very limited ram, because disko run in the installer, and needs to install tools to the ram to do the partition. This is only true if you use the disko-install tool, which is a horrible footgun[^1]. The safest approach is to just use the default disko command, then nixos-install. [^1]: https://github.com/nix-community/disko/issues/947

It's mostly bash scripts (I know I have stockholm syndrome there) and nixos-rebuild: https://www.haskellforall.com/2023/01/announcing-nixos-rebui... All the nix deployment tools had too much magic and broke, but nixos-rebuild always works and it's part of Nix! Disko was great for bootstrapping servers: https://github.com/nix-community/disko

I'm now running impermanence on NixOS servers. Setting it up was slightly more work, obviously, but it's been... freeing in a sense. My confidence that I can rebuild all servers at any time and that all the peculiarities of my setup are documented have never been higher. Rather than using a script for setup, I am using disko [0] with nixos-anywhere [1] and a small home-grown script that integrates with 1Password for deployments and it's wonderful, because everything including disk formatting is now purely declarative. [0] https://github.com/nix-community/disko [1] https://github.com/numtide/nixos-anywhere

> but it requires fiddling with partitions by hand Nowadays you can declare partitioning instructions with Nix just like the rest of the system: https://github.com/nix-community/disko And you can use something like nixos-anywhere with it for a alternative process, if your provider isn't as cool as Linode and won't let you boot arbitrary ISOs: https://github.com/numtide/nixos-anywhere Building images directly for cloud vendors' platforms on your local system and then pushing them up and assigning them to VMs is probably nicer than actually installing NixOS in the cloud, though. See this comment's siblings for that :)