🇪🇨 Ecuador Server is about Migrate to NixOS

[hyduez]

Last month I made a home server to host all org's infrastructure, that includes xmpp-server, cloudflared, writefreely, memos and some other services I use, like adguard-home, litellm, n8n, etc. This server handles almost every HTTPS and TCP/UDP traffic from dousec.org.

Because it was the first home server I ever made, I chose a distro where I was familiar to, that one was Void Linux. The workflow inside this system was containerized, all users had to use podman rootless and init their projects and add them to caddy reverse proxy if they exposed ports. But, yes, after two weeks of interrupted working, it's stable, but I don't like how CI/CD would be implemented on that system.

I'm dropping off from Void Linux to NixOS (only on this server, Oracle's machine stays on Ubuntu and my main PC on Void Linux). Also, we will start to use flakes with our own cache on every single project that integrate CI/CD.

Here are the reasons why I'm doing this:

Features	Summary	NixOS	Void Linux
Declarative Configuration	Trackable, reviewable, and reproducible configuration	Native: the entire system is defined in .nix files + scm can be added	Empiric: only the person who executed the commands knows
Bundling Projects	Includes CI/CD and the build process for images/binaries	Flakes: the self hosted runner builds OCI images and pushes them to Attic (self hoted nix cache) via flake.nix	Podman: manual layer construction of Dockerfile, the cache is local and often opaque
Multi-users	How much privilege have each user in the server	Open: users can send PR to @dousec/nixos and also define dynamic configuration to be load by the services	Closed: users can barely use podman for their containers and declare reverse proxies

So, after talking about generic reasons to do it, lets show off the stack we are going to use.

• attic - Multi-tenant Nix Binary Cache.
• Colmena - A simple, stateless NixOS deployment tool modeled after NixOps and morph.
• Arion - Run docker-compose with help from Nix/NixOS.

all taken from https://github.com/nix-community/awesome-nix

I will keep you with updates, I'm gonna first install it on a qemu vm, then I will fully migrate to it.

[hyduez]

I was reading a few resources (essentially related to flakes), between them:

• Nix from First Principles: Flake Edition - A modern crash-course to using Nix features, Flakes, and developing with Nix.
• Nix Shorts - A collection of short notes about how to use Nix, updated for Nix Flakes.
• NixOS & Flakes Book - An unofficial and opinionated NixOS & Flakes book for beginners.
• Wombat's Book of Nix - A book-length introduction to Nix and flakes.
• Zero to Nix - A flake-centric guide to Nix and its concepts created by Determinate Systems to quickly onboard beginners.

Although I already now the basic theory of flakes, nixlang, nix and nixos, I though something have changed on these years. I'm gonna use this template: - Nix Starter Config - A few simple Nix Flake templates for getting started with NixOS + home-manager.

Additionally, I'm gonna also use flake-parts and flake-utils.

[hyduez]

Of course, nixos.wiki is the main resource to learn about NixOS

[hyduez]

I made the first push to https://github.com/dousec/nixos, at the end i didnt use colmena or flake utils, just flake-parts and nixos-unified.