Comment by bsnnkv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsnnkv | Hacker News Reader

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My experience has been that after having become comfortable with Nix, self-hosting is the path of least resistance for the majority of "mainstream" tooling where you can pick between paying for a SaaS or self-hosting. So nice to not have to deal with Docker containers to deploy (most things) anymore.

I see a lot of people suggesting hosting on a VPS, but I feel that a Hetzner Auction box is often much better bang-for-buck and serves as a nice remote dev/build box for projects that need that extra oomph when you aren't working from a capable desktop or laptop.

[1]: This was the article that finally opened my eyes to the power of Nix for self-hosting https://arne.me/blog/plex-on-nixos, and it is such a huge upgrade from the previous Docker setup I was running[2]

[2]: https://github.com/madslundt/docker-cloud-media-scripts

That was a great write up on nix. Nix isn't something I know much about at all so thanks for the link.

What surprised me the most was learning rclone can mount object storage locally! That's vey interesting to learn :-)

One of the main reasons I use Docker is being able to run the exact same Dockerfiles locally and in prod, with virtualisation taken care of automatically on e.g. Mac.

Is Nix a viable alternative to that?

> Is Nix a viable alternative to that?

Yes, it even provides stronger reproducibility guarantees that what you build locally and what's on prod are exactly the same.

You can also build a docker container from the Nix expression, see:

https://nix.dev/tutorials/building-and-running-docker-images

If you are interested, I recommend then also checking out https://zero-to-nix.com/

Again, just my experiences as a long-time DevOps person- you can build Dockerfiles on two different machines and get two entirely different results (ie. success vs failure), and especially on macOS, Docker performance is quite poor, even moreso when mounting directories from the host.

Nix on the other hand will produce the same result every time wherever I run it. This alone for me is enough reason to prefer it over Docker the majority of the time.

Oh I was looking the thread of the cult :) /s

As a fellow follower, I can also recommend SNM[0] if anyone wants to self-host their e-mail. Works with zero maintenance, except upgrades which cause few lines to change.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

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