colmena VS nix-doc

- rpi nas

I also wipe my entire rootfs every boot with a zfs snapshot rollback[2] using the impermanence module[3] to keep specific stateful data one one of two datasets with regular snapshots: one is backed up with zfs send, the other is just for cache between reboots.

It took a little puzzling to get started, because I didn’t know about the impermanence module, so I built my own hacky solution. But I really love this setup. And the way I don’t have cruft to clean.

Also my backups are so much smaller now :’-)

[1]: https://colmena.cli.rs/

Answering your broader question (secret management) colmena does that for me outside the Nix store. I also use git-crypt to store secrets in the repo. There are also more Nix-y alternatives like agenix.

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

They shouldn't be, Colmena stringifies the keyFile values which is the same approach as NixOps uses to avoid this. Apparently I implemented that part myself, haha.

I myself use colmena's apply-local. Anyway, totally relate to the meme. Using the same tool to manage your servers and workstations, and reusing stuff between them is amazing.

I love nix, I've been using it for the last 2 years, I have a very stable setup from these 2 years of effort [0], and I just can't recommend Nix for Linux beginners, why?

It's not because of the nix language, It's not because of the CLI, it's because everything is scattered, you have to consult many places to find out how to do things with Nix, here is an example:

Usually, when I need a new complex program, like Steam, I first check the system-wide configuration [1], the wiki [2] and the package list [3], if I just want it on my user, I need to check if Home Manager has an option [4], if it doesn't, I can try using the "home.packages" option. Now, if I need to override something on the package, I need to remember how to do it with [5] [6] (while checking the source code for the package in parallel to find the options).

And then sometimes, on very rare occasions, I need to fine tune something with the nix language, so I need to check the builtins/lib docs [7], but some builtins are not there, so I need to either use nix-doc [8] or find the docs inside the code-bases [9] [10] (they are split between both repos)

For me, this is one of the main pain points of using Nix / NixOS that needs to be solved.

[0] - https://github.com/shiryel/nixos-dotfiles

[1] - https://search.nixos.org/options

[2] - https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Steam

[3] - https://search.nixos.org/packages

[4] - https://mipmip.github.io/home-manager-option-search/

[5] - https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-customising-packa...

[6] - https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/nixpkgs-overriding-packag...

[7] - https://teu5us.github.io/nix-lib.html

[8] - https://github.com/lf-/nix-doc

[9] - https://github.com/NixOS/nix

[10] - https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs