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Seems neat, better than Terraform, although limited to just nix and a few providers. Hopefully that will grow. I've been working on a provisioning tool myself.

Seems neat, better than Terraform, although limited to just nix and a few providers. Hopefully that will grow. I've been working on a provisioning tool myself. Provisioning is hard, and supporting multiple APIs can be really difficult.

arianvanp 9y ago
The `none` provider works for any servers that has an ssh connection. I use it myself to maintain my server on vultr.com . It has been pretty neat!
- 616c 9y ago
  So put on a Nix overlay on your Linux/Unix flavor of choice like people have done with pkgsrc in and outside the NetBSD community?
  - arianvanp 9y ago
    No. Vultr supports custom ISO's. And I uploaded the nixos image to my account
  - FrozenCow 9y ago
    I don't know how NetBSD handles this, but for any provider that doesn't allow you to use custom ISO's or ipxe, you can use [nixos-in-place](https://github.com/jeaye/nixos-in-place https://github.com/jeaye/nixos-in-place). I've used it before. It isn't ideal, but it gets the job done.
- dhess 9y ago
  FYI, there's a WIP PR for Vultr backend support in NixOps. https://github.com/NixOS/nixops/pull/634 https://github.com/NixOS/nixops/pull/634 I cherry-picked this into my local NixOps repo and have been using it for several weeks to deploy to Vultr servers with no issues, except one -- the author has hard-wired an assumption that you're using Btrfs for your root filesystem. I didn't want that so I simply replaced that hard-wired assumption with ext4 in my personal branch. Now everything is working great.
  - disassembler 9y ago
    I'm the author of that PR. I apologize for the forced usage of btrfs. This was one of my first delves into the nix language, and I literally copied the digital ocean backend and changed the API calls (and the d.o had a hardcoded filesystem and I wanted btrfs and didn't know how at the time to move that into the configuration level). After the 17.09 release of NixOS is completed, I'll put some focus back in that PR and hopefully get it merged upstream.
    - dhess 9y ago
      No need to apologize. It works great for my needs and it was easy enough just to hack your hack :)
mbrock 9y ago
I don't really see Nix as a limitation. It has a good claim to being a universal system configuration tool. Or how do you mean it's limited?
- matt4077 9y ago
  When I last tried it about 6 months ago it seemed to be a complete mess. I failed to get any recent ruby gems installed. There were dozens of different articles describing how to work with package repositories, and all of them seemed to be outdated by varying degrees. I also got the feeling that nix had more of a focus on desktop systems, for whatever reason.
  - tinco 9y ago
    I use it as a system level configuration tool, and then use Docker for the application level. This is not how the NixOS sees itself ideally, but in my experience their ideology does not map well to the reality of application deployment. So what I do is have all system level tools installed using NixOS: the OS, logging, systemd, Docker, sshd and so on. Then I have my applications built as Docker containers and provision them as systemd units also configured by NixOS files.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      That sounds reasonable, but it kinda makes me question NixOS' value proposition. It seems that any one of the current distributions works well as a generic base for containers. There are probably lots of systems running standard Linux packages with more complex configurations (i.e. Mailservers, maybe databases, proxies etc) where I could imagine it being useful? Or maybe their desktop work makes more sense than I thought–my desktop environment is much more customised than any server, and I've never tried if the setup scripts I try to maintain actually work.
      - tinco 9y ago
        I don't think any operating system at this moment does well as a base for containers. At least not from the box, and as soon as you have to customise the OS you need tooling like Puppet/Chef/Salt to make your customizations reproducible. And that's the exact value proposition of NixOS, it's not only reproducible, the OS will be a complete reflection of your Nix specifications from the ground up. I feel NixOS definitely gets some stuff wrong, and I hope at some point it gets some good competition. Mainly because the Nix language looks a bit awkward to me, and also because I don't fully get their package management situation. But the idea of having the operating system be configured from a specification is just a level up from old fashioned linux distros.

arianvanp 9y ago

The `none` provider works for any servers that has an ssh connection. I use it myself to maintain my server on vultr.com . It has been pretty neat!

616c 9y ago
So put on a Nix overlay on your Linux/Unix flavor of choice like people have done with pkgsrc in and outside the NetBSD community?
- arianvanp 9y ago
  No. Vultr supports custom ISO's. And I uploaded the nixos image to my account
- FrozenCow 9y ago
  I don't know how NetBSD handles this, but for any provider that doesn't allow you to use custom ISO's or ipxe, you can use [nixos-in-place](https://github.com/jeaye/nixos-in-place https://github.com/jeaye/nixos-in-place). I've used it before. It isn't ideal, but it gets the job done.
dhess 9y ago
FYI, there's a WIP PR for Vultr backend support in NixOps. https://github.com/NixOS/nixops/pull/634 https://github.com/NixOS/nixops/pull/634 I cherry-picked this into my local NixOps repo and have been using it for several weeks to deploy to Vultr servers with no issues, except one -- the author has hard-wired an assumption that you're using Btrfs for your root filesystem. I didn't want that so I simply replaced that hard-wired assumption with ext4 in my personal branch. Now everything is working great.
- disassembler 9y ago
  I'm the author of that PR. I apologize for the forced usage of btrfs. This was one of my first delves into the nix language, and I literally copied the digital ocean backend and changed the API calls (and the d.o had a hardcoded filesystem and I wanted btrfs and didn't know how at the time to move that into the configuration level). After the 17.09 release of NixOS is completed, I'll put some focus back in that PR and hopefully get it merged upstream.
  - dhess 9y ago
    No need to apologize. It works great for my needs and it was easy enough just to hack your hack :)

mbrock 9y ago

I don't really see Nix as a limitation. It has a good claim to being a universal system configuration tool. Or how do you mean it's limited?

matt4077 9y ago
When I last tried it about 6 months ago it seemed to be a complete mess. I failed to get any recent ruby gems installed. There were dozens of different articles describing how to work with package repositories, and all of them seemed to be outdated by varying degrees. I also got the feeling that nix had more of a focus on desktop systems, for whatever reason.
- tinco 9y ago
  I use it as a system level configuration tool, and then use Docker for the application level. This is not how the NixOS sees itself ideally, but in my experience their ideology does not map well to the reality of application deployment. So what I do is have all system level tools installed using NixOS: the OS, logging, systemd, Docker, sshd and so on. Then I have my applications built as Docker containers and provision them as systemd units also configured by NixOS files.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    That sounds reasonable, but it kinda makes me question NixOS' value proposition. It seems that any one of the current distributions works well as a generic base for containers. There are probably lots of systems running standard Linux packages with more complex configurations (i.e. Mailservers, maybe databases, proxies etc) where I could imagine it being useful? Or maybe their desktop work makes more sense than I thought–my desktop environment is much more customised than any server, and I've never tried if the setup scripts I try to maintain actually work.
    - tinco 9y ago
      I don't think any operating system at this moment does well as a base for containers. At least not from the box, and as soon as you have to customise the OS you need tooling like Puppet/Chef/Salt to make your customizations reproducible. And that's the exact value proposition of NixOS, it's not only reproducible, the OS will be a complete reflection of your Nix specifications from the ground up. I feel NixOS definitely gets some stuff wrong, and I hope at some point it gets some good competition. Mainly because the Nix language looks a bit awkward to me, and also because I don't fully get their package management situation. But the idea of having the operating system be configured from a specification is just a level up from old fashioned linux distros.