nixos-vagrant-kit

A simple starter kit to start playing with NixOS on Vagrant.

Vagrant Box

NixOS images on Vagrant Cloud are very out-dated and the current version of nixbox is currently broken (nix-community/nixbox#53). Instead of building your own box you can also trust a random stranger who published a current version: https://app.vagrantup.com/stefandeml/boxes/nixos-19.09-x86_64/

Requirements

The following tools need to be installed:

VirtualBox
Vagrant

How-Tos

Start a NixOS environment

First install the Nixos Plugin for Vagrant: vagrant plugin install vagrant-nixos-plugin

then clone this repo and run:

Boot the image: vagrant up
Ssh into the box: vagrant ssh

You notice that the folder ./shared on the host is synced with /vagrant on the guest system.

Start first nix-shell

We can now start our first nix shell. For this we describe our nix shell configuration on the host: Create shell.nix in ./shared with the following configuration:

# This imports the nix package collection,
# so we can access the `pkgs` and `stdenv` variables
with import <nixpkgs> {};

# Make a new "derivation" that represents our shell
stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "my-environment";

  # The packages in the `buildInputs` list will be added to the PATH in our shell
  buildInputs = [
    # cowsay is an arbitary package
    # see https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html to search for more
    pkgs.htop pkgs.cmake
  ];
}

On the virtual NixOS machine we can now enter this nix shell with:

change to the shared directory: cd /vagrant
instantiate the nix shell: nix-shell

We are now working in the nix environment described by shell.nix. Consequently, we now can use:

htop
cmake --version

Use exit to leave that environment.

Make changes to the NixOS configuration

We can simply apply changes to descriptive configuration of NixOS running. Just make changes to the configuration.nix in the ./config folder and the run vagrant provision to update the running virtual machine.