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 create a NixOS virtual machine using Vagrant. This setup can be useful to setup an environment for learning NixOS. 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. If something goes wrong, just revert to the working state. NixOS runs on common computers and architectures, and can be used both on laptops or workstations with a desktop environment, or on servers, both x86_64 and ARM64, like on the Raspberry Pi 3.