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Nix makes it really simple and easy to manage several machines. Builds are declarative and reproducible. For my homelab I’ve setup a git repo with config for se

Nix makes it really simple and easy to manage several machines. Builds are declarative and reproducible. For my homelab I’ve setup a git repo with config for several VMs: Plex, Bitwarden, torrents, Samba shares, etc. Deploying is as simple as pushing a new commit and then triggering a rebuild on a specific host. NixOS builds in “generations”. This morning I managed to screw up something and it bricked a VM. No worries, just restart the VM, boot into the previous working generation. Fix my Nix config, commit and push, rebuild again. Easy. I love it for managing my personal stuff. What I don’t like about Nix? The Nix language kind of sucks, has a steep learning curve, and lacks decent language tooling (LSP etc). If you’re on the beaten path everything is rosy, but as soon as you need to configure something or build a package that no one else has done before, it feels like you need to reverse-engineer Nix just to figure out how to do fairly basic tasks.

oever 4y ago
> Deploying is as simple as pushing a new commit and then triggering a rebuild on a specific host. Or you can forgo /etc/nixos and push from your current machine with nixos-rebuild switch -v --target-host machine2 --flake .#machine2
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  This works sometimes but cross arch builds can be problematic. I use Nix on macOS so I have to use a remote build host (or a VM).
  - oever 4y ago
    It's possible to push from x86_64 to aarch by setting this in the system configuration: boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems = [ "aarch64-linux" ]; With that setting pushing from e.g. laptop to raspberry works. Nix on macOS does not have that setting, but perhaps there's an equivalent.
- kahnclusions 4y ago
  This is true, if you have nixos-rebuild available on your current machine. I just use a script to run the command remotely via ssh and point to the flake in git.

oever 4y ago

> Deploying is as simple as pushing a new commit and then triggering a rebuild on a specific host. Or you can forgo /etc/nixos and push from your current machine with nixos-rebuild switch -v --target-host machine2 --flake .#machine2

xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
This works sometimes but cross arch builds can be problematic. I use Nix on macOS so I have to use a remote build host (or a VM).
- oever 4y ago
  It's possible to push from x86_64 to aarch by setting this in the system configuration: boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems = [ "aarch64-linux" ]; With that setting pushing from e.g. laptop to raspberry works. Nix on macOS does not have that setting, but perhaps there's an equivalent.
kahnclusions 4y ago
This is true, if you have nixos-rebuild available on your current machine. I just use a script to run the command remotely via ssh and point to the flake in git.