Nix/Flox way to replace ansible

Nix
1

Hi All,

I have issue which I would like to get some point of view of follow Nixers,
I am incharge right now on project that is sensitive situation (things needs to get fixed as soon as possible) the project it self is about a Linux system(Debian)+firmware+hardware that is getting sent to clients that might be behind firewall the OS itself getting provisioned with Ansible(either remote or locally) before that it will be boot to our own Debian image from 2020.

there were/are issues with this provisioning process mainly losing determinism of the build (apt-get install, Debian sources URL become invalid).
so in order to start a gradual change I started by creating a development environment in nix that will bring Ansible(and any other tool needed) and create a DSL out of writeShellScriptBins that will make the provision happen. this is good but it didn’t still solve the problem of determinism of the packages on the Debian system itself and the process needs the internet (if client is offline I would like to send them one executable that will update their system without the need for internet)

I guess the summarize the question I would like to get the “most birds in one stone” here therefor I see these options:

  1. nix bundle - which will use my current writeshellscript which wraps over ansible
    but this will only work on Linux machine (clients might be on windows)
    , maybe can I scp the bundle result into the machine

  2. Replace the entire Debian system with NixOS (create an image out of configuration.nix) if going this route I wonder what are my options/risks in terms on full offline update:

  • nix-copy-clojure?
  • sending them new image every time?
  • how involve will this be?
  1. docker?
  2. static compiled executables?

I am sorry if the question is too broad, but any idea will help.
could be even just a name drop of a library/tool.

1 Like
2

Hi, floxer here I’ll try to offer some feasible options for you:

  1. flox can do bundle but both in the nix and flox, it is limited to linux only at this time
  2. with flox, you could keep using debian, but use flox cli and flox environments on remote hosts.

typically with both nix and flox, the majority of use cases are currently geared toward having nix or flox installed on each system. flox does support running on linux, macos, and wslv2 on windows.

Again, the bundle approach is limited to building and running on linux systems only.

So if you need a cross-platform script, bundling flox or nix is not an option at this time, (unless you go the route of doing the bundling in a docker container, and deliver that, and the users can run docker containers locally).

Or, if they can have flox installed on their machines, you can give them scripts to pull and run environments (that will include whatever dependencies you want)

In the future, we may be able to support bundle on non-linux, but as of this moment we do not yet.

1 Like