Hey all, I’m wondering about giving NixOS a try. It seems like it’s mostly marketed for development environments and CI, but I haven’t seen much of anything about it being used on production servers. Right now I manage Alma 8 servers with Salt, and bootstrap Salt with a modified version of the ISO. NixOS seems like it could help streamline how I do things. Does anyone use it and have thoughts one way or another?
I love NixOS on the server! Run my non profit that way. It’s beautiful really, everything is declared and then you commit that to version control and it’s 100% reproducible. Just backup your data.
I would add that you can still do containers like docker, if you really want I believe there is a way to declare your containers too. It’s really awesome what NixOS can do.
Sweet, thats’s a big deal for me as well. Nobody else wants to learn any kind of orchestration or anything, so I’ve been trying to get Salt to manage the containers I have, and it’s a bit of a pain. Having them configured the same way as the server would prevent some headache, I think!
Absolutely! Nix seems to like the approach of do it their way, unless you don’t want to. Then do it your way! Lol
Note that unless you really need containers (such as the separate root fs), systemd services can provide pretty much all of container’s isolation. It’s opt-in but
systemd-analyze securitycan tell you about potential things you can lock down. Some NixOS modules already do this by default.And together with NixOS’s excellent modules which are usually a lot better than the container experience, personally I don’t see the use case for containers on NixOS especially looking at the added complexity they bring with them.
Ah, good to know, thank you. I hadn’t really considered that if the whole environment is scripted out like it is, then I wouldn’t get as much benefit out of them as I do otherwise. Good tip!