colmena VS nix-index

Compare colmena vs nix-index and see what are their differences.

colmena

A simple, stateless NixOS deployment tool (by zhaofengli)

nix-index

Quickly locate nix packages with specific files [maintainers=@bennofs @figsoda @raitobezarius] (by nix-community)
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colmena nix-index
7 11
967 715
- 7.1%
7.1 5.6
about 1 month ago 10 days ago
Rust Rust
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

colmena

Posts with mentions or reviews of colmena. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-09.
  • NixOS for the Impatient
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jun 2023
    - 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/

  • Understanding nixos secrets management/aws configuration
    4 projects | /r/NixOS | 16 Apr 2022
    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.
  • deploy-rs and colmena should combine efforts
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 20 Feb 2022
  • Wir schreiben für das c't-Magazin über Linux - fragt uns alles! [Beginn um 17 Uhr]
    11 projects | /r/de_EDV | 26 Jan 2022
  • The best solution for deploying flakes
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 30 Nov 2021
    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
  • Toy highly-available Kubernetes cluster on NixOS
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 4 Nov 2021
    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.
  • Big brain
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 26 Apr 2021
    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.

nix-index

Posts with mentions or reviews of nix-index. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-24.
  • Where to find SAR in the package manager?
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 24 Jun 2023
    nix-index can be used to provide this functionality, and to automate this process you can use nix-index-database (setup instructions are in the README).
  • Nix journey part 0: Learning and reference materials
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Mar 2023
    Are you using flakes? AFAIK `command-not-found` does not work with them. See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/171054 and https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-isnt-there-an-official-bui...

    I think `nix-index` works as a replacement: https://github.com/bennofs/nix-index

  • spd-say on NixOS
    1 project | /r/NixOS | 20 Jan 2023
    If you are on another distro or mac os there is also nix-index
  • Nix Package Search
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 5 Nov 2022
    nix-index is another option for searching for pkgs. You can search by name, or by specific files within a pkg.
  • Alternative to the "dnf provides"
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 15 Oct 2022
  • Building a program in NixOS
    1 project | /r/NixOS | 4 Aug 2022
    You can use nix-locate from https://github.com/bennofs/nix-index to find files on NixOS:
  • What is the package to install the gsettings binary?
    1 project | /r/NixOS | 11 Jun 2022
    nix-index makes it trivial to find which package contains a given file.
  • How to properly setup git clang-format in a shell.nix
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 6 Jun 2022
    There are two ways I know of: - If you use old-school channels, there's an index in the channel. In particular, the command-not-found hook is able to use that. In this particular case, you would have to guess that git will look for the git-clang-tools, and command-not-found that. This looks like it only works for programs, not arbitrary files. - In any case, you can use the more general nix-index. That's what I did because I use flakes.
  • An automatically-updated nix-index
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 15 May 2022
    I use nix-index a lot to find which derivation a file belongs to, but building the index takes a while and so I end up not updating it very frequently.
  • Rant: I want nix, but I'm almost done
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 29 Jan 2022
    Look at the library missing say X Use nix-locate to find the derivation that includes libX.dylib file (if it can’t find the macOS dylib version of the file try using the same name for linux by changing dylib for so) Add the derivation to you environmental and try again It will find the next missing library on the next compile.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing colmena and nix-index you can also consider the following projects:

deploy-rs - A simple multi-profile Nix-flake deploy tool.

nix-index-database - Weekly updated nix-index database [maintainer=@Mic92]

morph - NixOS deployment tool

nickel - Better configuration for less

nixops - NixOps is a tool for deploying to NixOS machines in a network or cloud.

persway - Petite Puppeteer of Pandemonium - your very own Sway IPC Imp

nixos-config

nix-doc - An interactive Nix documentation tool providing a CLI for function search, a Nix plugin for docs in the REPL, and a ctags implementation for Nix script

nixos-configurations

cue - The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration

archwiki - MediaWiki used on Arch Linux websites (read-only mirror)

nixos-search - Search NixOS packages and options