nixops

The nixops defaults module

Avoiding code repetition in a nixops deployment As with most configuration management tools, there are some options in nixops that need to be defined for virtually any machine in a deployment. These global options tend to be abstracted in a common base profile that is simply included at the top of a node configuration. This base profile can be used for including default packages, services or machine configuration usually needed on all machines—like networking debug tools and admin users with access to the whole network.

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The NixOps resources.machines option

The resources.machines attribute set NixOps provides the evaluated node configurations of a deployment network in the resources.machines attribute set. Using this information, one can easily implement machine configurations that are generated from options in an existing network. For example, a reverse proxy that automatically proxies to all other webservers in the network—one which could handle TLS termination for all of them—can be generated without having to manually define individual virtual hosts.

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From Vagrant to NixOps

I have been following the development of NixOps for some months. NixOps is a cloud deployment tool using nix, the functional package manager for unix systems. Nix makes it very intuitive to define absolute package dependencies. No more thinking and guessing about required runtime dependencies. NixOps supports deploying to different platforms. Bare-metal, cloud, and even virtual environments like virtualbox work out of the box. I have worked in many projects using vagrant.

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