nixos-mailserver VS dhall

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.

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If you mean installing Dhall's dependencies (https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...), those aren't too crazy, but they're definitely not all "beginner level". Template Haskell in particular is quite heavyweight.

Ok, lets be specific. Lets write a comment to explain this function:

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/blob/master/dhal...

I haven't tried it but apparently you can compile to Nix from Dhall:

> You can use this compiler to program Nix using the Dhall language. This package targets people who wish Nix had a type system.

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

If the problem is the syntax and people wants some other format that compiles to nix, there's dhall

https://dhall-lang.org/

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/tree/master/dhal...

https://www.haskellforall.com/2017/01/typed-nix-programming-...

Dhall is a generic config language with some programming capabilities (but not turing complete) that can compile to json, yaml, and other formats, like in this instance nix.

For my GSoC project, I built from scratch the dhall-csv package on the Dhall Haskell implementation Github Repository. Said package provides two executables, dhall-to-csv (which converts Dhall files into CSV files) and csv-to-dhall (which converts CSV files into Dhall files). It also provides Haskell libraries with the functions that translate bidirectionally between Dhall and CSV.

> If you add constraints (like not being able to feed the program to itself as is done in the halting problem and not allowing unbounded loops) then it is possible to determine if a program will terminate or not.

Dhall is a good example - https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell .

See also https://dhall-lang.org/

That just seems like an even greater nightmare to me. Soon you would have to learn to read and understand a custom program in a Turing-complete language for each and every installation.

The proper solution is a DSL, just a better DSl. Or perhaps a DSL embedded in something like dhall <https://dhall-lang.org/>, but definitely not a general-purpose programming language.

Dhall