NixOps

Warning

NixOps is in low-maintenance mode and probably not suited for new projects. Use at your own risks.

Note

An experimental rewrite of NixOps is happening under https://github.com/nixops4/nixops4

NixOps is a tool for deploying to NixOS machines in a network or the cloud. Key features include:

Declarative: NixOps determines and carries out actions necessary to realise a deployment configuration.
Testable: Try your deployments on VirtualBox or libvirtd.
Multi Cloud Support: Currently supports deployments to AWS, Hetzner, and GCE
Separation of Concerns: Deployment descriptions are divided into logical and physical aspects. This makes it easy to separate parts that say what a machine should do from where they should do it.
Extensible: NixOps is extensible through a plugin infrastructure which can be used to provide additional backends.

For more information, please refer to the NixOps manual.

Running

NixOps is included in nixpkgs and can be executed in a shell as follows:

$ nix-shell -p nixops

or for a bleeding edge version, including many fixes relative to the 1.7 series,

$ nix-shell -p nixopsUnstable

You may need access to a Nix remote builder if your system does not support the deployment's system builds directly. MacOS users may use a virtual machine with NixOS for this purpose.

It is also possible to use cross-compilation with NixOps, by setting nixpkgs.localSystem and nixpkgs.crossSystem. A mix of remote, emulated and cross builds is also possible; see this writeup on eno.space.

Building And Developing

Building The Nix Package

You can build the Nix package by simply invoking nix-build on the project root:

$ nix-build

Development Shell

shell.nix provides an environment with all dependencies required for working on NixOps. You can use nix-shell to enter a shell suitable for working on NixOps which will contain all Python dependencies specified in pyproject.toml

$ nix-shell

Executing Tests

Inside the development shell the tests can be executed as follows:

$ pytest

Documentation

NixOps' documentation uses reStructuredText. When editing the docs, get a live-reloading, rendered version of the docs:

nixops$ ./live-docs.py
Serving on http://127.0.0.1:5500

and verify its lints before committing:

nixops$ lint-docs

Contributing

Contributions to the project are welcome in the form of GitHub PRs. Please consider the following guidelines before creating PRs:

Please make sure to format your code using black.
Please add type signatures using mypy.
If you are planning to make any considerable changes, you should first present your plans in a GitHub issue so it can be discussed.
If you are adding features, please also add reasonable tests.

License

Licensed under LGPL-3.0.

NixOS/nixops