by EnigmaCurry
2 subcomments
- I'm happy to see this, and I have lots of thoughts about this. Building declarative services on Nix is a far superior way of distributing Linux to VMs than most any other way I've tried. I am working [1] on very similar things, but I've been leaning more on the self-hosted path, my VM template targets libvirt and Proxmox VE with a single CLI api. I even have an experimental branch that targets DigitalOcean. For VMs especially, I want my OS to be immutable. My VMs should contain no state other than my application state. Upgrades should be a full image replacement and reboot.
So in my template, I have created the VMs with two disks: first one is for NixOS and is built from an image, and it is read-only. The second is mounted to /var and is used for all system configuration as well as application state. If I have multiple VMs, they can all share the same base image (thin provisioned). That's the mode that I want for my deployments of services, immutable and as stateless as possible. For agent use, its different, you actually want a mutable NixOS root so that the agent can do what it wants.
I built three modes: immutable, semi-mutable, and mutable. mutable removes the read-only lock on the root, and just lets you manage the VM as a pet. semi-mutable adds an ephemeral overlayfs that gets wiped the next time you upgrade the base image. So that gives you kind of the best of both worlds: an immutable read-only base image and the ability to "nix profile add" whatever you (or your agent) wants, but with the contract that these imperatively installed things will disappear the next time you upgrade. Are you planning on adding a LICENSE to your machine0-nixos repo?
[1] https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/nixos-vm-template
- Big fan of exe.dev so the added Nix seems like a solid value add.
exe.dev is great but lurking in my mind is: "how will I replicate this if I ever need to move to AWS etc.." for all the service composition.
Site looks great too
- I’ve been using machine0 for hosting openclaw and a couple of web apps i’ve been working on. Great product super easy to use with claude code.
by farfatched
1 subcomments
- > Every VM gets its own static IP
How does this interact with per-minute pricing?
If I have a machine that's on for 1 minute per month, do I retain an IPv4 address for the whole month?
Or is it IPv6-only?
I recall exe.dev addressed this by not having static IPs, and instead only allowing SNI/SSH proxying to hosts.
by lavaman131
0 subcomment
- This looks really good. NixOS is a great operating system for reproducibility. I like also that you can spin up VMs via the CLI just as a convenience part too. This looks great for an individual developer. From the team perspective, if I create a golden snapshot of a dev env, is there a way within the product to sharae the image with others so they can spin it up instantly?
- I wonder how easy this would be to port to Guix?
- Very cool! I'll definitely check this out for auto-research like experiments, esp. with GPUs
by JeanEdern
1 subcomments
- How does machine0 handle NixOS state drift and recovery in practice—for example, if a VM is manually modified outside the flake, can I detect or reset that drift, and how do snapshots interact with flake-based provisioning?
- Very cool. I have something similar set up for my homelab where I launch nixos incus containers. Been great for offloading stuff from the my agents
- Looks cool. Can I run on other clouds.
by nightfuryg
0 subcomment
- Excellent idea. Is there a nixpkg available for it?
- Any good starter material out there for NixOS?
- I made this (minus NixOS support, I should add that) for proxmox VE using their API a few weeks ago. I mean it's not this extensive, but it works:
https://github.com/cdevr/dtt
I mean, I'm not going to claim it's remotely near the same quality. And proxmox has some holes in their support for cloud init. And of course you need a mini pc on a good internet connection or the like.
But extremely fast provisioning of a any of VMs ... very handy.
Proxmox has too many compromises though. Maybe I should do the reverse, and extend this until it can fully replace proxmox entirely.
- Great product, with great explanation
- So happy to see this, finally.
- [flagged]
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