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Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
Hi HN! Excited to launch machine0, a CLI that makes it easy to create, provision and snapshot persistent NixOS (& Ubuntu) VMs.
You can think of machine0 as a modern VPS provider. VMs stay on unless switched-off (with 99.99% uptime), they have static IPs and HTTPS endpoints, 1-60 vCPU, up to 240GB RAM and optionally GPUs. The CLI provides commands to manage lifecycle, snapshots and also provision the VMs using Nix flakes or Ansible playbooks. VMs are priced by the minute of usage.
What makes machine0 unique is that it has first class support for NixOS! In a nutshell, NixOS lets you define your entire OS as code (think Terraform but for your Linux). A flake declares your system state (packages, services, firewall rules, users...) and pins all dependencies via a lockfile. Given the same flake.nix and flake.lock, `nixos-rebuild switch` always produces the exact same system.
The NixOS ecosystem is mature, and flakes are expressive: at the system level you can define packages, what's in /etc, firewall rules, users & groups etc. At the user level, you can define your shell, aliases, tmux and vim config. Having your entire environment defined as code makes it easy to audit what's installed and how things are set up. You can rollback by reverting the last commit. And agents can write the code for you and test it against disposable machine0 VMs.
If you'd like to dive right in, these commands will get you started:
npm install -g @machine0/cli
machine0 new my-vm --image nixos-25-11 # create a new nixos VM
machine0 provision my-vm ./flake#my-profile # provision it using a nix flake
machine0 ssh my-vm # ssh in
machine0 stop my-vm # stop the VM
machine0 images new my-vm my-snapshot # create a snapshot
machine0 new my-clone --image my-snapshot # create a new VM from the snapshot
- Demo of installation + NixOS provisioning via Claude Code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT8N0_e3Vfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT8N0_e3Vfg
- Documentation: https://docs.machine0.io/introduction/overview https://docs.machine0.io/introduction/overview
- machine0 NixOS flakes: https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos
If you're in the habit of using VMs, or want to know what the NixOS fuss is about, would love for you to give machine0 a try!
- n3mo-dev 4mo agoGreat product, with great explanation
- bwm 4mo agoThank you!
- setheron 4mo agoBig fan of exe.dev so the added Nix seems like a solid value add. exe.dev is great but lurking in my mind is: "how will I replicate this if I ever need to move to AWS etc.." for all the service composition. Site looks great too
- bwm 4mo agoThanks! Yup, one of the benefits of defining your VMs as code using Nix, is that you can take that code to any supplier, and you're guaranteed exactly the same build.
- setheron 4mo agoCome join us at https://tacosprint.org/ https://tacosprint.org/ We have more availability! (Also sponsor maybe )
- JeanEdern 4mo agoHow does machine0 handle NixOS state drift and recovery in practice—for example, if a VM is manually modified outside the flake, can I detect or reset that drift, and how do snapshots interact with flake-based provisioning?
- dizhn 4mo ago[flagged]
- nc 4mo agoI’ve been using machine0 for hosting openclaw and a couple of web apps i’ve been working on. Great product super easy to use with claude code.
- bwm 4mo agoBeen great having you :)
- EnigmaCurry 4mo agoI'm happy to see this, and I have lots of thoughts about this. Building declarative services on Nix is a far superior way of distributing Linux to VMs than most any other way I've tried. I am working [1] on very similar things, but I've been leaning more on the self-hosted path, my VM template targets libvirt and Proxmox VE with a single CLI api. I even have an experimental branch that targets DigitalOcean. For VMs especially, I want my OS to be immutable. My VMs should contain no state other than my application state. Upgrades should be a full image replacement and reboot. So in my template, I have created the VMs with two disks: first one is for NixOS and is built from an image, and it is read-only. The second is mounted to /var and is used for all system configuration as well as application state. If I have multiple VMs, they can all share the same base image (thin provisioned). That's the mode that I want for my deployments of services, immutable and as stateless as possible. For agent use, its different, you actually want a mutable NixOS root so that the agent can do what it wants. I built three modes: immutable, semi-mutable, and mutable. mutable removes the read-only lock on the root, and just lets you manage the VM as a pet. semi-mutable adds an ephemeral overlayfs that gets wiped the next time you upgrade the base image. So that gives you kind of the best of both worlds: an immutable read-only base image and the ability to "nix profile add" whatever you (or your agent) wants, but with the contract that these imperatively installed things will disappear the next time you upgrade. Are you planning on adding a LICENSE to your machine0-nixos repo? [1] https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/nixos-vm-template https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/nixos-vm-template
- bwm 4mo agoAlways happy to meet others that are working with NixOS :) I've just added the License - it's MIT.
- OhSoHumble 4mo agoI tried out NixOS a few years ago but recently transitioned back to Rocky Linux and Ansible. I know that Nix is treasured by some but it always came across as an esoteric tool for functional programming idealists. I found the community to be split between people who were genuinely helpful and people who were just... not. I found Nix just really hard to work with. The documentation was just so poor and every aspect of Nix just seemed to be divorced from pragmatism. An example of this, years ago, was that I wanted to do something VERY simple: codify the creation of a directory in NixOS. It took me 6 HOURS to find the relevant code for doing that. I couldn't even get an answer out of the Discord server. I don't know if I'll ever pick it up again. The learning curve was incredibly steep and it's just not on job descriptions and I've never worked in a shop that has used it. I tried it out as a curiosity, found that it was hair pullingly frustrating to use, and moved on.
- Pet_Ant 4mo agoI wonder how easy this would be to port to Guix?
- bwm 4mo agoYou could point your agent at the machine0 CLI and ask it to :)
- cdevr 4mo agoI made this (minus NixOS support, I should add that) for proxmox VE using their API a few weeks ago. I mean it's not this extensive, but it works: https://github.com/cdevr/dtt https://github.com/cdevr/dtt I mean, I'm not going to claim it's remotely near the same quality. And proxmox has some holes in their support for cloud init. And of course you need a mini pc on a good internet connection or the like. But extremely fast provisioning of a any of VMs ... very handy. Proxmox has too many compromises though. Maybe I should do the reverse, and extend this until it can fully replace proxmox entirely.
- bwm 4mo agoI'm also a big fan of proxmox! Would be happy to help you extend machine0 though :) Happy to chat about your requirements over email: barnaby@machine0.io
- dmmalam 4mo agoLooks cool. Can I run on other clouds.
- bwm 4mo agoSoon!
- Bnjoroge 4mo agoVery cool. I have something similar set up for my homelab where I launch nixos incus containers. Been great for offloading stuff from the my agents
- bwm 4mo agoIt's funny, because my homelab is exactly where this started :)
- yapancha 4mo agoSo happy to see this, finally.
- bwm 4mo agoThanks! I'm so happy to be building this :)
- GeoffNN 4mo agoVery cool! I'll definitely check this out for auto-research like experiments, esp. with GPUs
- bwm 4mo agoYes, it's ideal for this!
- discova 4mo agoAny good starter material out there for NixOS?
- bwm 4mo agoYou could start here: https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos It'll click faster if you learn with an agent!
- farfatched 4mo ago> Every VM gets its own static IP How does this interact with per-minute pricing? If I have a machine that's on for 1 minute per month, do I retain an IPv4 address for the whole month? Or is it IPv6-only? I recall exe.dev addressed this by not having static IPs, and instead only allowing SNI/SSH proxying to hosts.
- bwm 4mo agoYou retain the IP as long as you keep the VM. If you delete it, you'll loose the IP.
- lavaman131 4mo agoThis looks really good. NixOS is a great operating system for reproducibility. I like also that you can spin up VMs via the CLI just as a convenience part too. This looks great for an individual developer. From the team perspective, if I create a golden snapshot of a dev env, is there a way within the product to sharae the image with others so they can spin it up instantly?
- nightfuryg 4mo agoExcellent idea. Is there a nixpkg available for it?