Nix Machines

This is my repository for all my various machines running NixOS (or Using Nix Darwin).

It has been created as an attempt at unifying all the various provisioning of software/cloud resources that must happen, such that for every instance there's a unified set of commands to run.

When running on a desktop machine, simply running nixos-install as per usual should suffice.

Servers

To provision the cloud resources needed, and install NixOS, the following can be run:

nix run '.#create-instance' -- <hostname>

This will run the provision.pre terraform code to ensure the cloud resources are created as needed, on either hetzner or openstack. It should also select the appropriate secrets backend to fetch secrets from. In general every server should use vault (OpenBAO) as the backend, except for the server hosting OpenBAO. Then it will install NixOS.

When making changes to eg. the approle needed, and needing to provision the instance again (but not installing NixOS again, as that won't work), run:

nix run '.#provision-instance' -- <hostname>

To update the NixOS config on an instance:

nix run '.#update-instance` -- <hostname>

To delete the resources again run:

nix run '.#destroy-instance' -- <hostname>

Secrets

To transfer the secrets needed for OpenTofu from Bitwarden to OpenBAO/Vault run:

nix run '.#bitwarden-to-vault'

Bootstrapping

security.kaareskovgaard.net

The first instance to create is security.kaareskovgaard.net as that hosts OpenBAO which is used to deploy all the other instances.

First read the README for that instance, regarding the bootstrapping process (flip a boolean switch in the configuration). Then:

nix run '.#create-instance' -- security.kaareskovgaard.net
nix run '.#configure-instance' -- security.kaareskovgaard.net

Then unbootstrap the instance and:

nix run '.#update-instance' -- security.kaareskovgaard.net
nix run '.#configure-instance' -- security.kaareskovgaard.net

monitoring.kaareskovgaard.net

Every instance attempts to send logs and metrics to the monitoring instance, as such this should be created next. This should be a simple:

nix run '.#create-instance' -- monitoring.kaareskovgaard.net

The rest

At this point every other instance should be able to be brought up. The create-instance command should be all that is needed.