sops-nix VS deploy-rs

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.

deploy-rs

Deploy-rs is a great alternative. It works as wrapper on top of flakes, local (optionally, cross-) building and copying closures to target machine with activation:

https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs

The SSH key I made for this uses yubikey authentication, and every time this opens a SSH connection it will ask for the key. There's some options you can add so multiple SSH sessions can use a single connection, but the current version isn't really working well with them (see e.g. https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs/issues/106)

I haven't really been in the market for something like this in a long while, but NixOS solved a lot of my headaches when it comes to maintaining a VPS and I'd like to try giving this a shot again. I'm not really interested in cloud/microservice/docker/cluser/whatever, I just want to use something like deploy-rs with a single host and maybe a VPN service like tailscale. What sorts of providers would y'all recommend?

I've messed around with deploy.rs. Simple enough to know what's going on.

https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs -- see: https://serokell.io/blog/deploy-rs

There are 4 tools I'm taking into consideration right now, but every suggestion is welcome: 1. deploy-rs - I don't know anything about it, heard about it like a day or two ago 2. NixOps - the official one, I don't know what to think, but I have concerns about Flakes compatibility 3. morph - I understand this as "NixOps, but better", no more toughs. 4. colmena - seems to be pretty straightforward with quite nice docs

deploy-rs is great for this as well