nix VS nixos-mailserver

I was able to make the switch over cold turkey after ~9 years of ArchLinux.

By sheer happenstance, I blogged earlier this week about one particular killer feature that doesn't get enough air time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344677

My not-flake-yet configuration can be found at https://github.com/rraval/nix

> How do NixOS users typically manage software that is not a Nix package

By writing a Nix package for it (I don't mean for this to sound flippant, tone is a bit hard to convey over text).

For example I have this alpha quality rust binary that I'm developing but I also want a stable version installed at the OS level. I write a Nix package and simply compose it into my overall NixOS configuration alongside the more official Nixpkgs: https://github.com/rraval/nix/blob/master/git-nomad.nix

> like a source code tarball where you would traditionally run configure && make && make install?

Nix has a bunch of defaults that make a conventional package like this straightforward.

Here's a package for a vanilla C binary + library that does the `autoreconf && ./configure && make && make install` dance: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/secu...

It's almost a little misleading because the actual steps are largely inherited from the defaults, you can read more about `stdenv.mkDerivation` here: https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/fundamentals-of-stdenv.ht...

Hello. I have a server running NixOS. Webserver etc. works well and without problems. I tried to install the Simple NixOS Mailserver (https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver). After configure it the incoming mail works fine (IMAP: mail.domain.com on port 993) but the mails won't go out.

If you are familiar with NixOS, and like to have everything declared in Nix configuration, Simple NixOS Mailserver is very robust and easy to use. Have been using it for ~2 years.

https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

I was able to set up a reliable email server using Simple NixOS Mailserver following the guide.

I just finished setting up my mail server on my nixos VPS (also huge thanks to nixos-infect devs), it was super easy. Just follow the guide and you have a working 10/10 mail server, I had no bumps along the way and everything just works. It even has flake support which I used. Check out the repo simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver.

I’ve been using nixos-mailserver for a while now: https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver It’s using dovecot and postfix.

If your willing to do some tinkering I recommend simple-nixos-mailserver. I don't use nixos much, but I do find its very good at this one thing.

If you have the option to install NixOS (or convert the preinstalled distro), I can recommend Simple NixOS Mailserver. It is a complete solution (postfix, dovecot, rspamd), and can easily be extended with roundcube webmail.

I recently got into running my own NixOS server—setting up Nextcloud[0], a website[1], DNS server and most recently a mail server[2] were all incredibly easy, in fact, setting up DNS records is more involved than configuring a mail server on NixOS! This was all done on a server with less than 10 GB of disk space as well.

With additional software such as NixOps, personal servers can also be easily spun up and provisioned.

While inevitably there are rough edges if you look deeply enough, I think the default OOTB experience has been incredible for use on a server and as a day-to-day distro. Highly predictable and declarative configurations is the way to go.

[0] https://github.com/siraben/dotfiles/blob/ffaaacf8888a5c4167b...

[1] https://siraben.dev

[2] https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

{ config, pkgs, ... }: let nixos-unstable = import { config = removeAttrs config.nixpkgs.config [ "packageOverrides" ]; }; in { imports = [ # Include the results of the hardware scan. ./hardware-configuration.nix (builtins.fetchTarball { url = "https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver/-/archive/nixos-21.05/nixos-mailserver-nixos-21.05.tar.gz"; sha256 = "1fwhb7a5v9c98nzhf3dyqf3a5ianqh7k50zizj8v5nmj3blxw4pi"; }) ]; disabledModules = [ "services/misc/mautrix-telegram.nix" "services/misc/matrix-synapse.nix" "services/misc/matrix-appservice-irc.nix" "services/web-apps/jitsi-meet.nix" "services/networking/jitsi-videobridge.nix" "services/networking/jicofo.nix" ]; nixpkgs = { overlays = [ # *snip* some local package definitions ]; config = { allowUnfree = true; packageOverrides = pkgs: { mautrix-telegram = nixos-unstable.mautrix-telegram; matrix-synapse = nixos-unstable.matrix-synapse; matrix-appservice-irc = nixos-unstable.matrix-appservice-irc; jitsi-meet = nixos-unstable.jitsi-meet; jitsi-meet-prosody = nixos-unstable.jitsi-meet-prosody; jitsi-videobridge = nixos-unstable.jitsi-videobridge; jitsi-videobridge2 = nixos-unstable.jitsi-videobridge2; jitsi = nixos-unstable.jitsi; jicofo = nixos-unstable.jicofo; util-linux = nixos-unstable.util-linux; # required by matrix-synapse }; }; }; # ...

I'm running matrix-synapse, nextcloud (in a nixos container), mumble, gitlab, vaultwarden, some game servers (i.e. Minecraft) and even my own mailserver with simple-nixos-mailserver.