sops-nix VS nixos-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.

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

Examples: - https://github.com/gmarmstrong/dotfiles/blob/master/nixpkgs/home.nix - https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/profiles/applications-setup.nix - https://github.com/gytis-ivaskevicius/nixfiles/blob/master/home-manager/common.nix - https://github.com/xtruder/nix-profiles/blob/master/home-manager/roles/desktop/work.nix

I am not in a state to write a detailed recommendation list for all the things you've mentioned, but: - There is indeed an official Matrix room: #nix:nixos.org . I believe this is the most popular Nix community out there. - As for multiple hosts, there are different approaches out there. Typically you will write NixOS "modules" (which are like pieces of configuration) and then merge (combine) them together, along with some machine-specific overrides, to get configurations for all your machines. I do something similar for my config. Here are the modules: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/tree/master/profiles which configure different pieces of my system, then those modules are combined into "roles" (e.g. here's a desktop role: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/roles/desktop.nix) and then those roles are imported from actual machine configs with some overrides (e.g. here's the config for the box I'm writing this from: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/machines/AMD-Workstation/default.nix)

Hey, inkscape build seems to be broken, but I have made a new working derivation that uses resvg instead: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/modules/workspace/gtk.nix#L32

I use a custom pass-based hack: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/modules/secrets.nix and https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/modules/secrets-envsubst.nix. My actual GPG key is on my yubi.

Adding self to local registry is done here: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/modules/nix.nix#L6

Ok, just checked with that nix version and my nixos-config, and I can build my configuration without .git in it.