Material for a short presentation and demo on how to use NixOS to deploy a simple service + reverse proxy using flakes. Intended as an opinionated tutorial. Slides use the slides presentation tool.
The following was tested on netcup using a VPS 500 G10s
server. Other providers or server variants will probably work too, but are
untested at this point.
After booking the VPS 500 G10s you will get an e-mail with the root
credentials and a debian-minimal image preinstalled.
Setup public-key based authentication on the server and run nixos-anywhere for intial deployment. The public key will persist after infection.
ssh-copy-id -o PubkeyAuthentication=no -o PreferredAuthentications=password root@94.16.117.189
ssh root@94.16.117.189
nix run github:numtide/nixos-anywhere -- --flake .\#awesome-server-01 root@92.60.37.228
You now have a NixOS server and can deploy this demo. You might want to set DNS records if you have a domain and configure the nginx virtual host accordingly, otherwise deployment will still work, but you won't get SSL certificates generated as the DNS challenge will fail.
Further deployments can be done with:
nixos-rebuild switch --flake '.#awesome-server-01' --target-host root@94.16.117.189
Note: Other deployment methods are possible and might be more suitable for
multiple servers.
nixos-anywhere is used here
for simplicity. Other options are using a deployment tool like
lollypops or uploading a pre-backed
.qcow2 image, which can be generated from a flake.