I feel sorta conflicted about my posted notes on nixops because shortly after that I discovered nixos-rebuild had remote deploys. Now nixos-rebuild itself is just a bash script and taking a peek inside is well, you know.. enlightening. There’s even a NixOS deployment tool written in just nix. I use nixos-rebuild…

nixos-rebuild switch \
  --target-host "nix@remote.host" \
  --build-host "localhost" \
  --no-build-nix

The nix packages collection has a neat library repository. A small nudge can make it completely standalone. Basically it allows experimenting quickly with configuration patterns for custom stuff without an expensive evaluation.

I might not remember correctly but lxc came out around 2008. Docker in 2013. The lxc commands had the trend of dashes in their name — lxc-attach, lxc-snapshot, lxc-copy and so forth. It had lots of boilerplate and a steep learning curve.

Then lxd arrived (in 2015?) to make everything user friendly. lxd is preferred. I still mostly use lxc out of habit.

After daily driving NixOS and the Nix pm for almost three years, it feels like it’ll be simplified by entities external to the project. It’s still in that academic phase (don’t do this/that) and needs software engineering asap.

That usually involves reducing boilerplate ruthlessly while generalizing/capturing fundamental uses cases (setting implicit best current practices). It’s reminiscent of lxc just before docker arrived for the masses.

btw this blog is served to you by NixOS :-)