nix-config VS deploy-rs

All the resources mentioned in other comments are pretty good, but mostly they are unofficial. The official NixOS wiki is very outdated and unmaintained. You will have better luck reading other people’s configurations, nixpkgs source code and GitHub issues. For the nix language the official wiki is a nice reference https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/language/index.html. This configuration is a great starting point https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config for learning by example. It covers most of what you may need, although bootstrapping your own config is quite rough. You may want to take a look at https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs. It’s very basic and should be simple to understand and improve.

Yes. E.g. some guy's config with 6 different machines[1]: multiple desktops, laptops, servers, a Raspberry Pi, and a VPS. That's a rather advanced use of Nix for configuration, but definitely shows what it's capable of.

[1] https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config

https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/main/hosts/celaeno/services/hydra/lib/release-host-branch.nix https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/main/hosts/celaeno/services/hydra/default.nix#L39

Implementation: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/main/pkgs/fetch-packwiz-pack/default.nix

the one i reference all the time is https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config

I believe Misterio77's does use it in his config.

I reuse the same btrfs logic on all my computers, including a RPi: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/main/hosts/common/btrfs-optin-persistence.nix

deploy-rs

Deploy-rs is a great alternative. It works as wrapper on top of flakes, local (optionally, cross-) building and copying closures to target machine with activation:

https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs

The SSH key I made for this uses yubikey authentication, and every time this opens a SSH connection it will ask for the key. There's some options you can add so multiple SSH sessions can use a single connection, but the current version isn't really working well with them (see e.g. https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs/issues/106)

I haven't really been in the market for something like this in a long while, but NixOS solved a lot of my headaches when it comes to maintaining a VPS and I'd like to try giving this a shot again. I'm not really interested in cloud/microservice/docker/cluser/whatever, I just want to use something like deploy-rs with a single host and maybe a VPN service like tailscale. What sorts of providers would y'all recommend?

I've messed around with deploy.rs. Simple enough to know what's going on.

https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs -- see: https://serokell.io/blog/deploy-rs

There are 4 tools I'm taking into consideration right now, but every suggestion is welcome: 1. deploy-rs - I don't know anything about it, heard about it like a day or two ago 2. NixOps - the official one, I don't know what to think, but I have concerns about Flakes compatibility 3. morph - I understand this as "NixOps, but better", no more toughs. 4. colmena - seems to be pretty straightforward with quite nice docs

deploy-rs is great for this as well