Quick start

Using the installer

An installer has been created to ease the installation process by bootstrapping a basic flake with a personal host and usernames. Information on how to build an ISO can be found on the here. The installer can also be used on any OS, that has nix available. Find more information about how to proceed here.

Creating your own configuration including sops-nix

This one is the harder way and is mostly suitable for people with a basic understanding of NixOS. Several preparations have to be made to bootstrap a working installation if not using the installer:

• A working hardware-configuration.nix needs to be generated for the current machine to replace mine, this includes having already partitioned disks.
• The hosts *.nix configuration should be adapted to suit the hardware's needs, eg. needed kernel modules or services.xserver.videoDrivers should be fitting
• Since sops-nix is used to handle secrets, my files need to be replaced with your own ones. Usage instructions can be found here, basically one needs to create an age public key from the host's ed21559 SSH private key, which is then added to .sops.yaml to allow the host to decrypt secrets while booting up. A fitting age key should also be generated and placed in ~/.config/sops/age/keys.txt as described in the usage instructions - this allows decrypting the secrets file to edit it. It lives in secrets/global.yaml and contains the secrets and can be edited with sops secrets/global.yaml (opens a terminal text editor).
• It might be easier to supply a static password in users.nix for bootstrapping since no login will be possible if the secrets management isn't properly set up yet. I had a few issues with this in the past while setting things up, so I felt giving this advice might help. Usernames are of course also to be changed, as well as SSH public keys.

Then, the bootstrapping process can be started. Here, nix + nixos-install-tools is sufficient to set up your our configuration as follows:

export NIX_CONFIG="experimental-features = nix-command flakes" # if flakes are disabled
nixos-install --flake .#hostname

If the operation succeeds, you will be able to boot into your new installation.

How to proceed from here?

• Adapt the configurations like enabled modules and home-manager configs to your needs
• Set up CI to build your custom system configurations
• Enable secure boot via Lanzaboote
• Add your hosts to Tailscale, if you want to be using it. I can warmly recommend it for connecting with any kind of host!
• Build an ISO to play around with nix run .#iso
• ... so much more. It never ends ❄️