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rictic 2 days ago  [ - ]

Yep. What nix adds is a declarative and reproducible way to build customized OS images to boot into.

CuriouslyC 2 days ago  [ - ]

Nix is the best answer to "works on my machine," which is a problem I've seen at pretty much every place I've ever worked.

0x457 2 days ago  [ - ]

It's also an answer to caching with /nix/store. I wish more cloud services supported "give me your nixosConfiguration or something similar" instead of providing api to build containers/vms imperatively. Dockerfile and everything that mimics it is my least favorite way to do this.

Cyph0n a day ago  [ - ]

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 your config partitioned based on your disk config. My disko config in this case (ZFS pool with 1 disk vdev): https://gist.github.com/aksiksi/7fed39f17037e9ae82c043457ed2...
0x457 a day ago  [ - ]

I know that part is easy, i just nix-anywhere just yesterday to reinstall one of my servers. It's not what I'm talking about.

Cyph0n a day ago  [ - ]

Okay, so your idea is that cloud providers should make this even easier?

    $ nixos-rebuild build-image --flake .#myhost --image-variant amazon
    $ aws-cli image upload < result/images/image.ami
    $ aws-cli create vm --image={image}
pillbitsHQ a day ago  [ - ]

[dead]

schmuhblaster a day ago  [ - ]

Or try this: https://github.com/deepclause/agentvm, it's based on container2wasm, so the VM is fully defined by a Dockerfile.