NixOps is a tool for deploying sets of NixOS Linux machines, either to real hardware or to virtual machines
NixOps is a tool for deploying sets of NixOS Linux machines, either to real hardware or to virtual machines. It extends NixOS’s declarative approach to system configuration management to networks and adds provisioning. For example, here is a NixOps specification of a network consisting of two machines — one running Apache httpd, the other serving a file system via NFS:
{
webserver =
{ deployment.targetEnv = "virtualbox";
services.httpd.enable = true;
services.httpd.documentRoot = "/data";
fileSystems."/data" =
{ fsType = "nfs4";
device = "fileserver:/"; };
};
fileserver =
{ deployment.targetEnv = "virtualbox";
services.nfs.server.enable = true;
services.nfs.server.exports = "...";
};
}
The values of the webserver and fileserver attributes are regular NixOS system specifications, except for the deployment.* options, which tell NixOps how each machine should be instantiated (in this case, as VirtualBox virtual machines running on your desktop). You can then run:
$ nixops create -d simple network.nix
$ nixops deploy -d simple
This will create the EC2 instances, and then build, upload and activate the NixOS configurations you specified. To change something to the configuration, you just edit the specification and run nixops deploy again.
NixOps makes it easy to abstract over target environments, allowing you to use the same “logical” specification for both testing and production deployments. For instance, to deploy to Amazon EC2, you would just change the deployment.* options to:
deployment.targetEnv = "ec2";
deployment.region = "eu-west-1";
NixOps currently supports provisioning the following resources:
Amazon EC2 instances. VirtualBox virtual machines. Hetzner machines. NixOS containers. Many Amazon resources, such as S3 buckets, EC2 key pairs, elastic IPs, and so on. Getting it If you already have Nix or NixOS installed, you can get NixOps by running:
$ nix-env -i nixops
You can also get the latest development version; see the manual for details.
