nixos-generators

ilt a live CD image with that same config and will soon roll out my Nix config to all my Ubuntu machines & Debian servers. I won't look back. I won't deny, though: I still don't like the language too much and I think it is tied too much to building an OS, as opposed to anything else. Documentation is sparse and mediocre at best. But overall it's alright! Things are usually not that complicated, and most of the time they just work! (And if they don't, it's surprisingly easy to navigate the nixpkgs source code and look up what's happening under the hood.) In any case, my new Nix config is so much better than the set of bespoke Bash scripts I've written over the years to (reproducibly?) configure my Ubuntu desktop with i3wm for me. [0]: nixos-generators is magical when you first try it! https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators (Fine print: Of course with the benefit of hindsight I now know that it's merely a dumb wrapper around things that Nix provides out of the box but oh well.)

gone. If I want to spin up a fresh server, I have to read a guide and set stuff up by hand? Just as with ansible, "git pull to deploy". You'd keep a copy of your NixOS configuration.nix somewhere else, and would be able to apply it later. > it really does let me just get a new VPS and deploy to it very fast Using a tool you're familiar with to get the job done is going to be faster than learning to use a tool you're unfamiliar with. I believe much of the use of NixOS is for hobby stuff, and for personal machines. (c.f. "In what environments do you use Nix", Development (1242) vs Home Server (845) vs Production (386) https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983).

l machine formats. I'm using the nixos-generators[1] project to construct 8 or 9 image formats from one NixOS configuration. Packer and similar tools are the non-nix analog, but nixos-generators requires essentially adding a singular line to support something like Proxmox as opposed to much more work in some other tool. I'm also using nix to build all our team's software - which varies from Vue.js to Rust to Django - and fold _all_ those development dependencies into a singular nix `devShell`. This means you can clone our repository, use `nix develop .`, and all engineers use the identical verisons of all software, dependencies, and libraries across several toolchains. It's incredibly convenient. (Imagine that you're a .js developer who needs to make a quick edit to a Rust backend route but doesn't sling Rust all day - you don't need to know how to setup rust at all, the `devShell` provides it). [1]: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators

binary by automatically getting their shared dependencies at runtime[1]? Or generating bootable ISOs from your NixOS configuration[2], cross-compiling with little effort[3], and so on. These problems have already been solved to varying degrees in other places, but Nix lets you unify them (think of the huge amounts of libraries downloaded by cargo, cabal, node and so on scattered amongst projects and your home folder, Nix stores everything in /nix/store/) into a single framework. I'd like to also say that the Nixpkgs repository[4] is super easy to contribute to, just open a PR on GitHub as opposed to sending patches via mailing lists, which is checked via the CI. I'm not sure if there's something analogous on other package repositories but there's also a bot[5] that opens thousands of PRs updating and testing packages automatically. [0] https://github.com/Shopify/comma [1] https://github.com/Lassulus/nix-autobahn [2] https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators [3] https://matthewbauer.us/blog/beginners-guide-to-cross.html [4] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/ [5] https://github.com/r-ryantm

to have another instance with attached extra EBS drive, use dd to write raw image on that disk. Then disconnect the EBS, create a snapshot of it and convert the snapshot to an AMI.