nixos-mailserver VS NixOS-docker

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.

Luckily, I did not have to start from scratch as Nix serves their own docker image. I mounted one of my directories and was able to drop into a Nix shell with my configuration file.

There is one: https://github.com/NixOS/docker

But it's more of a Nix docker image than a NixOS one, because half of the things that NixOS gives you don't really make much sense in a docker image (systemd in a container?).

I only know of the nix package manager. https://hub.docker.com/r/nixos/nix

Ability to run buildkite agents inside a kubernetes cluster on preemble instances without need to modify agent’s Dockerfile every time new dependency comes up - was one of major reasons to learn Nix. I’m just using nixos/docker image as a base, install buildkite-agent and some base stuff like bash via nix-env inside Dickerfile, everything else lays in flake.nix of every project my dockerized nixified buildkite agent run.