flake-utils-plus VS deploy-rs

You don't need channels to use nix-shell or nix-env. You can generate the Nix path and registry from your flake inputs. flake-utils-plus makes this easy with nix.generateRegistryFromInputs and nix.generateNixPathFromInputs.

Use flake-utils-plus to easily define multiple systems in flake.nix.and then use the --target-host flag of nixos-rebuild to deploy it remotely.

If you're trying to handle multiple systems with one config a flake is a significantly better option. I would personally recommend looking at flake-utils-plus and specifically this example config.

I looked at some past threads / examples and saw people recommend flake-utils-plus, but after reading the examples I don't understand how I would get home-manager on Darwin or Ubuntu.

Depending on your specific needs, the channelsConfig (modify arguments passed to Nixpkgs) and overlay tooling in flake-utils-plus may be adequate: https://github.com/gytis-ivaskevicius/flake-utils-plus/tree/...

For flakes you don't have to set up everything manually there are helper libraries, I use flake-utils-plus.

Converting to flakes is not that hard if you use a good library. The documentation is other people's configs, really.

Neat! I've been using flake-utils-plus's implementation until now. https://github.com/gytis-ivaskevicius/flake-utils-plus/blob/master/lib/repl.nix

I use flake-utils-plus based configuration to apply patches on top of nixpkgs where overlays don't suffice.

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