From Zero to Prod with NixOS

I'm thinking about writing a guide of how to use NixOS in production starting from scratch.

I come from a background of not being an ops person at all, and so from not knowing anything about systemd, user permissions and the like. I liked the idea of NixOS, but when it came to the moment of setting up a production system to try it, basically it was 6 months of looking at posts and trying to understand how all the pieces fit together. I would like to write a book that goes through all the steps you might need in setting up a production system and explains along the way why these are for. I'm leaning toward writing a guide for baremetal. Basically it's not that hard to manage baremetal machines with nix once you have a bit of knowledge. Of course the performance and price benefits are significant.

Here is the outline of what I would like to write.

    Installation (The documentation covers the basics, but here cover things like ZFS, raid setup)

    Managing your system with flakes

    Create a non root user, why and how

    Managing secrets

    Setting up a database

    Making backups

    Deployments

    Going through a web service example

The idea being to give a simpler onboarding process to try nixos on production, and to explain along the way concepts that can be interesting (e.g. what is ZFS and why should I care about it)

I'm thinking of going through the following process.

Offering support and influence on the end product in a paid tier (through patreon or the like). Meaning after I write a chapter, submit it to the paid supporters, help them go through their issues, modify the content that is too vague then release it in an open repo in some kind of git book format. The end result should be open to help the community at large.

Feel free to signal

- if you are interested in the idea but not convinced that this is the right way to do it

- dm me if you are interested in support for this.