<style> .reveal section.present div { font-size: 0.8em; line-height: 1.0em; vertical-align: top; } </style> # disko + nixos-anywhere workshop full automatic nixos installations with declarative disk managment --- # Motivation - In our work with numtide we are installing NixOS a lot - We often deal with a wide range of platforms, that provides different ways of bootstrapping, not all of which supports NixOS as a native method. - Building and uploading installer images to all these platforms is tedious - What we want is to be able to bootstrap NixOS *anywhere* in the same way --- # Background: Installing NixOS 1. Boot & access the NixOS installer on the target system - highly dependent on the environment (virtual machines, bare-metal server, laptops ...) 2. Partition, format and mount the disks 3. Copy or write nixos configuration 4. Run `nixos-install` 5. Reboot *Installing NixOS manually can be tedious and unergonomic* --- # The solution: ## Nixos-anywhere + Disko 1. **disko** is used by importing the nixos module and configuring a disk layout. 2. **nixos-anywhere** * Takes your nixos configuration with a disko config and automatically installs it over ssh. * If your target is not yet boot into an installer it can also use "kexec" to load a NixOS installer into memory to replace the current OS --- # Disko features - Declarative partitioning (GPT/MBR) - ZFS with multiple devices - Raids with mdadm/lvm - Luks encryption - Bcachefs --- # The workflow: 1. Use our flake template 2. Choose a disk layout 3. Optional: Test in a VM 4. Install --- # Requirements: - A machine with Linux with SSH access that supports kexec ## Or - A machine booted into the NixOS installer with ssh (manually) started --- ## Step 1. Use our flake template Enable flakes: ```shell mkdir -p ~/.config/nix echo 'experimental-features = nix-command flakes' >> ~/.config/nix/nix.conf ``` Run ```shell nix flake new --template github:Lassulus/nixos-anywhere-workshop ./workshop ``` <!--`git clone https://github.com/Lassulus/nixos-anywhere-workshop`--> --- ## Step 2. Choose a disk layout In disk-configs there are a bunch of different layouts, choose one by setting it in the flake.nix like this: ```nix { nixosConfigurations.mysystem = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem { ... modules = [ ./disk-configs/simple-efi.nix; ... ]; }; } ``` --- ## Step 3. Optional: Test in a VM Run the interactive nixos-vm test: ```shell nix run github:numtide/nixos-anywhere -- -f '.#mysystem' --vm-test ``` --- ## Customizing You can take a look at the different disk layouts and choose which one you want Or create your own disk layout by copying stuff from the [disko](https://github.com/nix-community/disko/examples) examples folder --- ## Final Step Install If vm test was successfull, you can deploy the config to a remote system with: ```shell nix run github:numtide/nixos-anywhere -- -f '.#mysystem' root@yourhostname ``` Hints: * Take extra care to add the network config to your configuration and also add your ssh keys * Otherwise you will lock yourself out --- ## Other cool features of disko/nixos-anywhere * Secret support: * nixos-anywhere supports upload secrets to the final system (i.e. bootstrapping agenix/sops-nix) and for disk encryption * Image creation: * disko supports generating disk images (including secrets) with arbitrary, commplex disk layouts --- ## Future work * PXE boot. [Working branch, tests still missing](https://github.com/numtide/nixos-anywhere/pull/50) * Automatically generating hardware configuration