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Comment by tomberek | Hacker News Reader

I work on Nix and think this paradigm has already impacted and will continue to influence software devopment in general. I want to make it easier for organizations/companies/groups to adopt it. Ideas and questions are welcome.

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I'd start with getting some sort of working governance structure going. The sheer number of duplicate libraries all competing with each other has to be hurting Nix. Trying to figure out a TS/NodeJS build was an utter nightmare a year ago as I ended up going through five different projects, including the new "internal" solution, none of which worked reliably.

I contributed to the community for about a year and have since left for a number of reasons, but this is near the top.

Governance has been a difficult thing to make progress on. I can say that we did discuss recently cleaning up some of these old solutions and making official approaches clearly marked as such.

I run NixOS on a VPS at work. It currently hosts a noVNC dashboard for monitoring. I didn’t nixify the app yet.

I allocated a Debian and ran nixos-infect on it and started from scratch, even though I have done this for two other machines, because I’m still experimenting with the basic setup.

I do commit changes to git and fork it on company git. But I don’t redeploy remotely: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/deploy-nixos-configurations-on...

I’ll need to make noVNC a part of the deployment (not just its dependencies, like python3).

I should deploy using AWS AMIs, and make a config for the dashboard.

But the NixOS on Hetzner docs are not nearly as easy to guess the best path through. Can you recommend a way to boot NixOS on a Hetzner VPS that is better than nixos-infect?

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Install_NixOS_on_Amazon_EC2

http://jackkelly.name/blog/archives/2020/08/30/building_and_...

I have step-by-step video guides (with accompanying git repos) for booting NixOS from zero on both Hetzner VPS instances[1] and bare metal Robot instances[2] with nixos-anywhere[3]. I used to use nixos-infect but now I'm 100% sold on nixos-anywhere.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr22CyoyRo4

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlX8g0NXW1M&t=952s

[3]: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

If Hetzner allows custom images, then this tool may help: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators

Cloud-init can be clumsy to get going, but it’s possible.

I used kexec into nixos installer image from hetzner recovery, using nixos-generators to make the image.

1. Boot with hetzner recovery OS

2. Install Nix in it (not nixos!)

3. Install nixos-generators

4. Generate kexec-bundle image

5. run the result of 4 and continue installation from it.

I think the fastest path to adoption is to build a front-end for nix so that non-technical users can use it like they would Ubuntu. Users could select packages and edit system config through a GUI, which would be built/deployed when the the user clicks "save" or whatever, with an "advanced" mode where users could edit and add extra text config if they wished. SnowflakeOS [1] and Fleek [2] are admirably starting to work towards that, but there isn't enough of a concerted community effort to make it a first class feature of NixOS. If/when something like this were mature, you could then take it to the next level, where you could have something similar to an "app marketplace" where users could share flakes or sets of config that do things, like "Jake's blinged out desktop" or "Home router setup", essentially adding an additional layer of easy composability on top of base packages that most systems support.

Apologies if there is already something like this in work by the core nix devs.

[1] https://snowflakeos.org/

[2] https://getfleek.dev/

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