nixops VS terraform

Compare nixops vs terraform and see what are their differences.

nixops

NixOps is a tool for deploying to NixOS machines in a network or cloud. (by NixOS)

terraform

Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. (by hashicorp)
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nixops terraform
10 497
1,684 40,914
5.2% 1.8%
6.4 9.9
20 days ago 6 days ago
Python Go
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only 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.

nixops

Posts with mentions or reviews of nixops. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-18.
  • 20 Years of Nix
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2023
    As far as I know, it’s still about [0]. I’ve had a better experience with deploy-rs though [1] - or even just using nixos-rebuild to target the remote machine.

    [0] - https://github.com/NixOS/nixops

  • Will we move away from DSLs?
    3 projects | /r/devops | 29 Apr 2022
    For example Nix can already replace ansible, packer, cloudformation[1], dockerfiles.
  • NixOS History and Our Experience - Nix, Null, Nada, Nothing
    8 projects | /r/NixOS | 26 Jan 2022
    Nix can also ship the nixpkgs as an oci image (e.g. docker image), vm image, iso, or if you're able to: as a nixos configuration. Tools like nixops can allow you to deploy many machines and have their behavior exactly specified, and the configuration can be version controlled. NixOS configuration can be thought of as congruent configuration management, where many other tools give you many less guarantees about configuration drift and reproducibility.
  • 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
  • Spectrum OS: a declarative, reproducible, compartmentalized Linux
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Sep 2021
    I'm still relatively new to NixOS, having switched all my personal systems over to it this spring/summer. I don't have a detailed answer to your question, but I believe NixOPs is the canonical way to do what you're describing in production/at scale:

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixops

    https://nixos.org/nixops/manual/

  • NixOS 21.05 Released!
    8 projects | /r/linux | 2 Jun 2021
    Well, everyone of course! But especially devops, developers, power-users, and ricer folks. Due to the declarative and purity aspect of nixpkgs, all builds and configurations can be version controlled, cached and shared. NixOS can easily be extended to produce docker images, vm images, or even distributed deployments. You can also write reproducible multi-node integration tests. Tinkerers! Love playing around with the latest desktop manager or modifying builds? Nixpkgs allows you to modify any package you wish to, locally! Nixpkgs is actually a source distribution but its guarantees around purity and reproducibility are so strong that you can get a binary cache "for free".
  • Backblaze Is Now a Terraform Provider
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2021
    You could use NixOps[0] for Nix but I'm not sure you can directly compare Terraform and Guix/Nix? My set up involves Terraform for infrastructure and Nix for provisioning, and it's working for me so far.

    [0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixops

  • Benefits/disadvantages of Guix System in general and over NixOS?
    5 projects | /r/GUIX | 10 Feb 2021
    I'll have to read more about NixOps though, I had kind of forgotten that it existed!
  • NixOS Linux
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2021
    Kind of off topic, but I would love to have NixOps (https://github.com/NixOS/nixops) as an abstraction layer for every type of cloud service, and not just virtual machines (e.g. queues, object storages, etc).

    There is Terraform and Ansible, of course, but Nix seems like it could combine the strengths of both of them.

terraform

Posts with mentions or reviews of terraform. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-18.
  • I Deployed My Own Cute Lil’ Private Internet (a.k.a. VPC)
    8 projects | dev.to | 18 Mar 2024
    Each app’s front end is built with Qwik and uses Tailwind for styling. The server-side is powered by Qwik City (Qwik’s official meta-framework) and runs on Node.js hosted on a shared Linode VPS. The apps also use PM2 for process management and Caddy as a reverse proxy and SSL provisioner. The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database that also runs on a shared Linode VPS. The apps interact with the database using Drizzle, an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) for JavaScript. The entire infrastructure for both apps is managed with Terraform using the Terraform Linode provider, which was new to me, but made provisioning and destroying infrastructure really fast and easy (once I learned how it all worked).
  • Configurar AWS Signer en lambda con terraform
    2 projects | dev.to | 18 Mar 2024
  • Cranelift code generation comes to Rust
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
  • The Essential Guide to Internal Developer Platforms
    3 projects | dev.to | 13 Mar 2024
    For example, integrating Terraform for infrastructure as code (IaC) into the IDP can streamline updates and rollbacks.
  • Experience Continuous Integration with Jenkins | Ansible | Artifactory | SonarQube | PHP
    8 projects | dev.to | 24 Feb 2024
    In this project, you will understand and get hands on experience around the entire concept around CI/CD from applications perspective. To fully gain real expertise around this idea, it is best to see it in action across different programming languages and from the platform perspective too. From the application perspective, we will be focusing on PHP here; there are more projects ahead that are based on Java, Node.js, .Net and Python. By the time you start working on Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes projects, you will get to see the platform perspective of CI/CD in action.
  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    37 projects | dev.to | 20 Feb 2024
    Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.
  • 🦊 GitLab CI: Deploy a Majestic Single Server Runner on AWS
    4 projects | dev.to | 17 Feb 2024
    To quickly deploy the architecture, we will be using Terraform. With Terraform, we can automate the deployment process and have our infrastructure up and running in minutes.
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    47 projects | dev.to | 5 Feb 2024
    terraform.io — Terraform Cloud. Free remote state management and team collaboration for up to 500 resources.
  • Root Cause Chronicles: Quivering Queue
    5 projects | dev.to | 16 Jan 2024
    Robin was neck-deep trying to finish writing a new Terraform module and replied without looking up, “What’s gone wrong?”.
  • Authorization and Amazon Verified Permissions - A New Way to Manage Permissions Part XII: Terraform
    5 projects | dev.to | 15 Jan 2024
    Welcome back to my blog post series dedicated to building authorization using Cedar and Amazon Verified Permissions. In a previous blogpost we've learned about batch authorization. Today, we will take a look at how to build AVP with one of the most popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool - Terraform.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nixops and terraform you can also consider the following projects:

terragrunt - Terragrunt is a thin wrapper for Terraform that provides extra tools for working with multiple Terraform modules.

Docker Compose - Define and run multi-container applications with Docker

terraform-provider-restapi - A terraform provider to manage objects in a RESTful API

crossplane - The Cloud Native Control Plane

boto3 - AWS SDK for Python

nvim-lspconfig - Quickstart configs for Nvim LSP

sceptre - Build better AWS infrastructure

cue - CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue

helmfile - Deploy Kubernetes Helm Charts

cloud-custodian - Rules engine for cloud security, cost optimization, and governance, DSL in yaml for policies to query, filter, and take actions on resources

example-bazel-monorepo - 🌿💚 Example Bazel-ified monorepo, supporting Golang, Java, Python, Scala, and Typescript

coc.nvim - Nodejs extension host for vim & neovim, load extensions like VSCode and host language servers.