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nix-community
impermanence
Nix2022–2026
nix-community / impermanence

impermanence

Modules to help you handle persistent state on systems with ephemeral root storage [maintainer=@talyz]

14Distinct people
14Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
1.9KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Modules to help you handle persistent state on systems with ephemeral root storage [maintainer=@talyz]

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

I use colmena[1] to manage one nixos configuration for multiple machines: - laptop - desktop - server - rpi nas I also wipe my entire rootfs every boot with a zfs snapshot…

techhazard used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:01:12 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year14 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-01-24 18:10:48 UTC to 2026-08-26 08:04:19 UTC.

012342022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20242025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

4 sources
Mostly private use, I have 2 servers and a laptop configured with this: https://github.com/matrss/nixfiles. The servers host a bunch of different services from Nextcloud to a DoT-to-ODoH proxy and some more. I've also introduced some light NixOS usage at work (3 hosts, one is an uptime-kuma instance, two are Forgejo Actions runners). For that I had to get some proprietary scanner software to run on it, which I could by just putting the extracted deb package in an emulated FHS environment and setting up a service for it, all declaratively. Even for interfacing with legacy systems and unusual stacks I don't think you will need the escape hatch. Anything that is buildable on and above the abstraction-level of "ensure a file is present at some path with some content" should be doable declaratively, and that includes setting up an unusual soft
Read the rest
ware stack and running it in systemd services to communicate with some other legacy system or whatever. The escape hatch is there to modify how NixOS itself behaves, and modifying that should only be necessary to extend NixOS' core functionality. A quick search revealed that impermanence (https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence) and in some cases sops-nix (https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix) use it, but those fundamentally extend NixOS with ephemeral root storage support and secrets management, respectively.
In NixOS is not reproducible
I would not call these projects unbelievable, but they are neat. Opt-in state: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings Ease of setting up a real-time audio on Linux: https://github.com/musnix/musnix Generating virtual machines/installators from a configuration: https://github.com/astro/microvm.nix https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators It's interesting to scroll through nix-darwin options, I wasn't even aware of some useful macOS options before: https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/index.html A neat collection of music information retrieval packages in one place (and the ease of creating your own package registry): https://github.com/carlthome/mirpkgs
In Tvix – A New Implementation of Nix

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