nixos-config VS sops-nix

Here’s Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp) setup config.

https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config

In my case, I started by installing the NixOS using the Gnome Installer on VmWare fusion, and then modified it using the example config from mitchellh as a guide. Actually entering the configuration yourself definitely helps with learning.

I have a NixOS dev environment in a VM which I built based on https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config. Similar to that setup, I use Flakes for my main configuration, and use home-manager to install + configure dev tools that I want available across multiple projects

Yes, maybe not as easily. Check my setup https://github.com/kohlerm/nixos-config which I forked from https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config a while ago

Hi, if u can not get a linux pc - then have a look on the following thing (nixos). https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config

I'm developing mostly using console applications like vim so I don't need GUI apps for what I'm doing and this made me wonder if it's not better to simply spin a Linux VM inside my macOS to do my development. Something like this: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config (this guy is one of the founders of Hashicorp)

One of the most popular NixOS configs on GitHub does this https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config

The README describes the experience, though the author takes the approach of using the VM mainly for terminal-based stuff.

This post focused solely on the Nix package manager and Nix packages - for anyone that uses MacOS but is interesting in trying NixOS (or using it within a VM in MacOS), I definitely recommend Mitchell Hashimoto's NixOS repo: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config

Honestly, doing that may be easier and a better option than using Nix packages in MacOS.

For applications, I think environment variables are great. Especially if you adopt nomad because you could also use vault to populate secrets in. For machines that won't work so you'll need something else like https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix

I've heard good things about and seen sops-nix used on a few really solid configs. Others tend to use Age or Homeage.

You can use something like sops-nix if you're on NixOS https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix.

Yeah, I don't know how to manage secrets yet. I've read about sops-nix, but I don't have the slightest clue how to integrate it into my own nix-config.

I use sops-nix for that. Secrets are stored encrypted in the store, and decrypted at runtime.

One think I saw that I don't recommend is to change your password after installing; that's not very reporoducible, use users.users..hashedPassword or users.users..passwordFile with agenix or sops-nix.

So, I did some digging. According to the first Dicourse chat that popped up, it's "not possible". That's not an acceptable answer for me ;). I read through HM's appendix to see if there's a mention of private keys there (there weren't). I also know of SOPS (and sops-nix), but that seems to require an SSH/GPG key to decrypt :D.

If you only need secrets management, there are quite a lot of bolt-on solutions with little overhead which are also agnostic to the form of deployment, like https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix or https://github.com/ryantm/agenix. Personally for my machines I want unattended reboots, so I just copy all keys to the hard disk and manage secrets solely with file permissions.