Hacker News Reader

What does this give you over using NixOS?

NixOS is aiming for the same goal, I believe. NixOS is built on top of different package manager, Nix.

With aptly you're still using your favorite Debian/Ubuntu distro, installing packages with apt-get and so on.

How about using Nix on Debian/Ubuntu?

The issue with this setup is that you can't define "services" from within Nix without NixOS. A service basically ties together a set of packages and configuration and puts them in systemd.

At the moment, you'd have to use an external configuration management system for actually defining your systemd services, etc.

I deploy a couple things via Nix package manger to non-NixOS systems, and I manage my own system configs, etc. within Nix. My "external configuration management system" is pared down to a small script that symlinks everything in a directory into another directory (such as /etc/init).

One thing missing from Nix is ability to store passwords and the like in the nix store, and from what I understand this applies to NixOS as well as using Nix outside NixOS. For example, every file in the nix store is world readable.

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/8

NixOps gets around this to some extent by allowing you to define keys to be copied to /run/keys when configuring a remote system. They thus never touch the remote store.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com