I used to have a VPS running a traditional OS (CentOS) that I eventually got rid of. One of the reasons I tried to migrate away from it was from the sysadmin perspective, I felt like the server once everything was configured was a bit of a snowflake.

Obviously configuring everything through nix and being able to easily rollback changes sound very compelling.

Have folks used nix as a server OS? How’s your experience been?

  • jboyensEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    It’s pretty great at being a server OS, honestly.

    There are tons of modules that set up services well. Almost everything I’ve wanted to run already has a module and it’s as easy as services.name.enable = true.

    By far my favorite aspect has been being able to declaratively configure things like Prometheus or Traefik. It solves a problem I end up trying to solve with a lot of glue (and YAML) at work.

    Being able to recover from disaster by just checking out your git repo and doing a rebuild makes everything else feel a little… hacky. You don’t need a separate system to manage config files or software versions.

    I sound like a fanboy because I am. It’s been revolutionary for me.