NixOps – Declarative cloud provisioning and deployment with NixOS

Post by arianvanp » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 3:46 PM UTC

mrkgnao wrote: post #16

In view of some replies downthread: yes, application-level management is entirely possible with Nix(OS). Currently, this works best for Haskell, for which there is a sizeable amount (relatively speaking) of Nix tooling available. This is largely because a lot of Nix(OS) users also use Haskell, perhaps because lend themselves to very similar modes of "declarative" thinking. This is a thorough, excellent guide on how t…

Post by reificator » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 3:49 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #21

philipov wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I use it to deploy either client or server applications on windows? All configuration and deployment tools I've looked at seem like they assume the only deployment target is linux servers running web applications. I don't care about the web. I need a deployment tool that works for local research on my clients' analysts' desktops, not just devops on remote somewhere.

Have you looked into the Windows features of Ansible or SaltStack? Would be interested to hear about experiences with them.

Post by FrozenCow » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

zimbatm wrote: post #14

zeisss wrote: post #5

Is there good explanation anywhere of the syntax of those files? I tried getting into nix multiple times and was always put off by the lack of understandability of this.

Nix is a bit like JSON + functions. An object (called attrset in nix): { a = 3; b = 4; } A list: [ 1 2 3 4 ]; A string: "hello" A multi-line string: '' multine string '' This defines a lambda with two arguments: a: b: a + b; It's possible to pattern-match arguments. This accepts an attrset with keys a and b, and maps them to local variables: { a, b }: a + b; There are some variations around that like `{ a ? 3 }:` `{…

    {
        a = {
            b = {
                c = 3;
            };
        };
    }

    {
        a.b.c = 3;
    }

    services.openssh.enable = true;

Post by olejorgenb » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 4:20 PM UTC

zeisss wrote: post #5

Is there good explanation anywhere of the syntax of those files? I tried getting into nix multiple times and was always put off by the lack of understandability of this.

Post by aseipp » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 4:41 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #29

zbentley wrote: post #10

Other than integration with the rest of the Nix/NixOS ecosystem, how is NixOps different from Puppet? Reading briefly through the examples, it seems very oriented towards provisioning machine instances rather than provisioning behavior across networks or multi-machine services, which is something that Puppet really excels at. What features does this offer in addition to ones that Puppet provides? That said, I've been…

Linux wasn't designed to be an immutably-configured operating system. When systems like Puppet try to apply configuration to a target server, they're operating on top of a layer which is inherently stateful, which has a propensity to cause all sorts of problems. What if somebody manually entered this server and screwed with the configuration, outside of Puppet? What if poorly packaged applications don't cleanly unins…

    boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_latest;

    $ nixos-rebuild build-vm
    $ ./result/bin/run-*-vm

      services.tarsnap.enable = true;
      services.tarsnap.archives =
        { nixos =
          { checkpointBytes = "5GB";
            directories =
            [ "/root" "/etc/nixos"
            ];
          };

          home =
          { excludes = [ "*.o" "*.hi" ];
            checkpointBytes = "5GB";
            directories =
            [ "/home/a"
            ];
          };
        };

    $ systemctl start tarsnap@home
    $ systemctl start tarsnap@nixos