Dynamic NixOS configuration, using flakes · nix

Stream: nix

Topic: Dynamic NixOS configuration, using flakes

Pratham Patel (Apr 28 2024 at 17:19):

Hello everyone, for a long time, I had been deploying NixOS and devshells using the traditional, non-flake approach. As I had some time a few months ago, I tried flakes and understood why they're so useful.

I had written an "installer script" in Bash that would, depending on hardware detected, add lines to a host-specific-configuration.nix file which, as it's name suggested, was host-specific and not included in the git tree. This always rubbed me the wrong way as it it was a very hacky solution and also something that couldn't be in the git tree. After getting familiar with Nix, I could easily get rid of this monster from the installer script, leaving it only essential duties like partitioning, formatting, mounting and calling nixos-install. Everything else was moved from Bash statements to Nix expressions.

Though I haven't yet written a blog about this, you can checkout my configuration repository. It includes the following outputs:

NixOS configurations
Standalone (non-NixOS) home manager configurations for Linux and Darwin
ISOs with an up-to-date kernel and packages that I need

This post was made mostly to help anyone else who stumbles on the same problems I did and hopefully not waste a lot of time because of the widely known documentation issue.

https://github.com/thefossguy/prathams-nixos
https://gitlab.com/thefossguy/prathams-nixos (same thing, mirrored on GitLab)

Pratham Patel (Apr 28 2024 at 17:23):

The obvious next step is to use disko but I need some more experimentation with it in a feature branch before mass deployment.

Srid (Apr 29 2024 at 00:27):

Pratham Patel said:

The obvious next step is to use disko but I need some more experimentation with it in a feature branch before mass deployment.

Have you looked into disko-install?

cf. https://nixos.asia/en/nixos-install-oneclick

Pratham Patel (Apr 29 2024 at 02:37):

I do intend to, just need some more time to tinker with. Probably this weekend :)

Pratham Patel (Apr 29 2024 at 11:17):

Update: Added a GitHub workflow to build x86 and arm64 build nightly. workflow file
The only thing that I haven't gotten around (other than the RISC-V issue for my SBCs) is targeting x86 and arm64 Darwin. At the moment, my company laptop is an Intel MBP and will tend to arm64 once I own one. :)