Run NixOS in a DigitalOcean Droplet
This little tutorial will show you how to turn an Ubuntu Droplet (VM) on DigitalOcean into a NixOS Droplet using nixos-infect. NixOS is a Linux distribution which is declaratively configured using a specification written in the Nix expression language describing the desired state of the system. It supports automatic upgrades and rollbacks.
Aside from DigitalOcean, you can run NixOS on most common computers. It’s possible to run NixOS on ARM64 computers, like on the Raspberry Pi 3.
In this tutorial we’ll transform Ubuntu 18.04 LTS into NixOS 19.09 Loris.
Prepare
Create a Droplet on DigitalOcean, I’d recommend a minimum of 2GB RAM, running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Transform into NixOS
First, clone the nixos-infect
repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect.git
Then simply run nixos-infect
:
cd nixos-infect/
./nixos-infect
Give it some time and you’ll eventually have a NixOS installation on your Droplet. Please note that this is highly experimental and not something for any sort of production use.
There are loads of configuration options you can provide to nixos-infect
and NixOS itself. Please refer to the nixos-infect
documentation and the NixOS documentation.
Good luck! 😀