TIL: nixos-anywhere

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I built a snapshot to install NixOS on a Hetzner server. I’ve used that snapshot to start a couple of server and it’s worked well but the fact that there are a couple of manual steps to perform after the installation kinda sucked.

Recently while browsing the NixOS discourse a user suggested nixos-anywhere to me for these types of NixOS installations so I gave it a try and I have to say it’s a much better experience than the snapshot approach.

With nixos-anywhere I can just specify the nix configuration I want for the server, give it a disk layout using disko and it handles the rest. Agenix secrets will only work after the installation process finishes because they’ll have to be rekeyed with the new server host key.

My config is up on Github at configuration.nix 😄