I wanted to play around a bit with NixOS and NixOps. Those are the notes on how I got started with it on macOS and an VM inside VirtualBox.
You need to have nixops installed locally. I installed nix on macOS Big Sur via the tutorial on Philipps blog post and then ran nix-env -i nixops.
The following two configuration files are needed for a first simple NixOps setup.
trivial.nix
{
network.description = "Web server";
webserver =
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{ services.httpd.enable = true;
services.httpd.adminAddr = "alice@example.org";
networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 80 ];
services.httpd.logFormat = "combined";
services.httpd.virtualHosts = {
"main" = {
documentRoot = "/tmp";
};
};
};
}
trivial-vbox.nix
{
webserver =
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{ deployment.targetEnv = "virtualbox";
deployment.virtualbox.memorySize = 1024; # megabytes
deployment.virtualbox.vcpu = 2; # number of cpus
deployment.virtualbox.headless = true;
};
}
Create deployment:
$ nixops create ./trivial.nix ./trivial-vbox.nix -d trivial
Show deployment state:
$ nixops info -d trivial
Network name: trivial
Network UUID: 89dbba3d-4f9c-11eb-b54e-acbc32a44755
Network description: Web server
Nix expressions: /Users/morris/Projects/nixops-machines/trivial.nix /Users/morris/Projects/nixops-machines/trivial-vbox.nix
+-----------+---------+------------+-------------+------------+
| Name | Status | Type | Resource Id | IP address |
+-----------+---------+------------+-------------+------------+
| webserver | Missing | virtualbox | | |
+-----------+---------+------------+-------------+------------+
Deploy machine (that creates the VM and deploys the NixOS configuration):
$ nixops deploy -d trivial
webserver> creating VirtualBox VM...
webserver> Virtual machine 'nixops-89dbba3d-4f9c-11eb-b54e-acbc32a44755-webserver' is created and registered.
webserver> UUID: db550623-f02f-4e8c-a0c8-e79ec7dee325
webserver> Settings file: '/Users/morris/VirtualBox VMs/nixops-89dbba3d-4f9c-11eb-b54e-acbc32a44755-webserver/nixops-89dbba3d-4f9c-11eb-b54e-acbc32a44755-webserver.vbox'
webserver> creating disk ‘disk1’...
webserver> these derivations will be built:
webserver> /nix/store/rr7p21npwab33dyf0aph8vlkqqhvkxlk-virtualbox-nixops-19.03.172205.ea497998e4b.vmdk.xz.drv
webserver> /nix/store/sw3bp8vnc3m2cp0lfv1pfjm2kk9p9pvj-virtualbox-nixops-21.03.vmdk.drv
webserver> these paths will be fetched (2.87 MiB download, 9.22 MiB unpacked):
webserver> /nix/store/01pkcbbpl13rrvgxlhcbxyfbsi88g56s-curl-7.74.0
webserver> /nix/store/1cvgyzi5hz4ni0cz5pv09frgq6lln9i4-stdenv-darwin
webserver> /nix/store/301q4qwn3rvl9b8l0c5296bgrf9hb914-curl-7.74.0-bin
webserver> /nix/store/48mk2wkwhrhpcfzsr23kbh25lkirhwih-openssl-1.1.1i-bin
...
Check the machine state:
$ nixops check -d trivial
Machines state:
+-----------+--------+-----+-----------+----------+----------------+------------------------------------------+-------+
| Name | Exists | Up | Reachable | Disks OK | Load avg. | Units | Notes |
+-----------+--------+-----+-----------+----------+----------------+------------------------------------------+-------+
| webserver | Yes | Yes | Yes | N/A | 0.02 0.16 0.14 | ● home.mount [failed] | |
| | | | | | | sys-fs-fuse-connections.mount [failed] | |
| | | | | | | sys-kernel-config.mount [failed] | |
| | | | | | | ● tmp.mount [failed] | |
+-----------+--------+-----+-----------+----------+----------------+------------------------------------------+-------+
Non machines resources state:
+------+--------+
| Name | Exists |
+------+--------+
+------+--------+