nix.dev VS nixos-anywhere

Nix (https://nix.dev/) can provide all of this, although in a smarter way than just through dumping everything in the VCS. Some projects use it already to provide a reproducible development environment and if done right a clean build is just a `nix-build` away.

Author doesn’t mention it but I wonder if tried or considered Nix/NixOS’s reproducible developer environments and ruled them out for any reason. I couldn’t tell from the article if there’s something unique to his requirements that disqualifies them.

https://nixos.org/explore

https://nix.dev/

if you want something a more in-depth, zero to nix is a great resource for all things nix (they have a section dedicated to flakes here, but i would pay attention to the notice at the top about reading some other things first), along with nix.dev, and of course, the nixos wiki article on flakes

On nix.dev it say I would need to cross compile to make it work, is there some way in which i can build natively on my machine.

Hey

Cachix founder here. Here are a few links for getting started:

- https://nix.dev Nix tutorials

- https://devenv.sh Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments

Let me know if you have any questions. Domen

Nix pills and nix.dev are my favorites, alongside the official documentation.

https://nix.dev/ is the best in depth resource I know but it's a work in progress.

For folks looking to understand why this is so https://nix.dev and https://devenv.sh/

I have step-by-step video guides (with accompanying git repos) for booting NixOS from zero on both Hetzner VPS instances[1] and bare metal Robot instances[2] with nixos-anywhere[3]. I used to use nixos-infect but now I'm 100% sold on nixos-anywhere.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr22CyoyRo4

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlX8g0NXW1M&t=952s

[3]: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

I think things are pretty good with nixos-anywhere[1] now. I made a video last month walking through the process of provisioning a VPS on Hetzner Cloud[2] if you want to see what the process looks like in real-time.

[1]:https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr22CyoyRo4

> I can speak new instances of my environment into existence

You're not kidding. I used nixos-anywhere [1] for the first time the other day. You can point it to any linux host and it will partition, format, and supplant the target's existing OS with your nixOS config, all with a single command. Incredible.

[1] https://github.com/numtide/nixos-anywhere

There's a few scripts to replace the current os with NixOS: eg https://github.com/numtide/nixos-anywhere