nixos-anywhere

Sounds cursed. But I'm not judging, given that I use nixos-anywhere[0] on an almost weekly basis. [0] https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

It’s fairly trivial to map your NixOS config into a VM image: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-image-nixos-rebui... An alternative is to “infect” a VM running in whatever cloud and convert it into a NixOS VM in-place: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere In fact, it is a common practice to use the latter to install NixOS on new machines. You start off by booting into a live USB with SSH enabled, then use nixos-anywhere to install NixOS and partition disks via disko. Here is an example I used recently to provision a new gaming desktop: nix run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere -- \ --flake .#myhost \ --target-host user@192.168.0.100 \ --generate-hardware-config nixos-generate-config ./hosts/myhost/hardware-configuration.nix At the end of this invocation, you end up with a NixOS machine running

Thanks for bringing the disko command to my attention. However, since we are talking about installing NixOS declaratively, and it's done through nixos-anywhere, which will install it[0] to the ram unfortunately. [0]: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere/blob/abb0d72...

It's definitely possible. nixos-anywhere [0] implements this in a neat package for NixOS specifically. I am relatively certain you could use the same script to boot into a different distribution, though the installation part itself would obviously need to be adapted. [0] https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

And for cloud/dedicated servers perhaps https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere (There's also a terraform module ) And for state changes https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs Or Colmena /nixops/ and x other For secret handling perhaps https://github.com/ryantm/agenix/ + https://github.com/oddlama/agenix-rekey The ecosystem is in my experience very well fleshed out (7 yrs of use), as long as you don't require a knowledgebase/wiki/ up2date documentation, it's not been a issue for me since I could always fall back on Linux knowledge and just looking for how other distributions do x / how the thing itself is configured , and looking at how perhaps a existing nix module wraps that

nixos-anywhere is a tool that allows you to do something similar (?) to install NixOS in-place on a remote machine (using kexec “magic” under the hood). https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere I tried it on a Hetzner VPS and was honestly pretty surprised that it even worked. What makes it even cooler is that you can continue to rebuild the machine’s config remotely even after initialization (thanks to NixOS).

Nonetheless, Nix/NixOS is more reproducible than the majority of other build systems and distros out of the box. But yes, if this is a hard requirement, you’ll be better off with a different choice. Keep in mind that this is but one of the features NixOS provides. I would say the config-driven approach to OS management is extremely powerful. As an example, I could bring up my homelab’s external reverse proxy on a generic VPS in a few minutes over SSH using a single command. This includes SSH keys, Telegraf, Nginx with LetsEncrypt certs, and automatic OS upgrades. No Ansible needed :) See: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

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

I have step-by-step video guides (with accompanying git repos) for booting NixOS from zero on both Hetzner VPS instances[1] and bare metal Robot instances[2] with nixos-anywhere[3]. I used to use nixos-infect but now I'm 100% sold on nixos-anywhere. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr22CyoyRo4 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlX8g0NXW1M&t=952s [3]: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

I think things are pretty good with nixos-anywhere[1] now. I made a video last month walking through the process of provisioning a VPS on Hetzner Cloud[2] if you want to see what the process looks like in real-time. [1]:https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr22CyoyRo4

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 :)

> I can speak new instances of my environment into existence You're not kidding. I used nixos-anywhere [1] for the first time the other day. You can point it to any linux host and it will partition, format, and supplant the target's existing OS with your nixOS config, all with a single command. Incredible. [1] https://github.com/numtide/nixos-anywhere