sops-nix VS nix-config

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.

All the resources mentioned in other comments are pretty good, but mostly they are unofficial. The official NixOS wiki is very outdated and unmaintained. You will have better luck reading other people’s configurations, nixpkgs source code and GitHub issues. For the nix language the official wiki is a nice reference https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/language/index.html. This configuration is a great starting point https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config for learning by example. It covers most of what you may need, although bootstrapping your own config is quite rough. You may want to take a look at https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs. It’s very basic and should be simple to understand and improve.

Yes. E.g. some guy's config with 6 different machines[1]: multiple desktops, laptops, servers, a Raspberry Pi, and a VPS. That's a rather advanced use of Nix for configuration, but definitely shows what it's capable of.

[1] https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config

https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/main/hosts/celaeno/services/hydra/lib/release-host-branch.nix https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/main/hosts/celaeno/services/hydra/default.nix#L39

Implementation: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/main/pkgs/fetch-packwiz-pack/default.nix

the one i reference all the time is https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config

I believe Misterio77's does use it in his config.

I reuse the same btrfs logic on all my computers, including a RPi: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/main/hosts/common/btrfs-optin-persistence.nix