Something like nixos-infect?

Something like nixos-infect?

[ilmu]

Hi everyone,

I'm in the process of moving to guix with all my systems and I'm trying to start with the “cloud”.

While I have some experience with nixos, and linux more generally, I tend to be a bit helpless with some problems.. especially when I'm getting started.

As a starting point I copied something that was suggested to me in the guix telegram group (t.me/gnuguix) but I wasn't able to get it to work (although I didn't try very hard yet - I'm not fully moved in and my physical computer setup is not great for the time being).

This is what I have: git.sr.ht/~ilmu/server

The reason I'm posting this here is twofold:
- maybe someone already has a solution they can share
- maybe someone would also like to have something like this and appreciates the starting point

I will gradually figure this out over the coming months and end up with a situation where that repo works and a short google-able blog post with instructions (maybe by using nixos-infect as my base rather than this hostile-takeover script I inherited).

Thank you all for your hard work, looking forward to working with you in the future.

Kind regards,
- ilmu

Re: Something like nixos-infect?

[Vincent Legoll]

Hello,

Since you didn't fully explain what you want to achieve,
I'll speculate a bit...

On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 9:59 PM ilmu <ilmu@rishi.is> wrote:
> This is what I have: git.sr.ht/~ilmu/server
>
> The reason I'm posting this here is twofold:
> - maybe someone already has a solution they can share
> - maybe someone would also like to have something like this and appreciates the starting point

I think you'll find something useful here:

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Binary-Installation.html
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/plain/etc/guix-install.sh

This could replace line 7-20 from your script, I.e. the "contamination"
part, the "infection" is left as an exercise (and it looks like you're on
the right path)...

;-)

But maybe something like the following would be better suited:
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-deploy.html#Invoking-guix-deploy

Tchuss

-- 
Vincent Legoll

Re: Something like nixos-infect?

[Vincent Legoll]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 10:23 PM Vincent Legoll
<vincent.legoll@gmail.com> wrote:
> Since you didn't fully explain what you want to achieve,
> I'll speculate a bit...

Or maybe you want to mutate a foreign distro (since they don't have guix
images / OS templates) from a cloud provider into a real guix system...

-- 
Vincent Legoll

Re: Something like nixos-infect?

[Tim Lee]

> Something like nixos-infect?

It looks like there is something named "guix-infect":
https://github.com/guix-mirror/guix/blob/v1.2.0/gnu/machine/digital-ocean.scm#L191

Perhaps the blog article about 'guix deploy' would help you:
https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/managing-servers-with-gnu-guix-a-tutorial/

I think nix-infect will become less relevant in the future because
nixos-generators (https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators) is
able to generate custom images for many cloud service providers. Instead
of overwriting an exiting system with NixOS, the custom images boot
directly into NixOS.

It seems that something like nixos-generators is possible in Guix:
* "Hosting a blog using only Scheme"
  (https://othacehe.org/hosting-a-blog-using-only-scheme.html)
* "Re: Easy DigitalOcean setup?"
  (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2020-11/msg00053.html)
  See the attached do-conf.scm file in that reply.

It seems that Guix suffers from the lack of documentation in this area
(installing and deploying on the cloud).