How to: set up a new machine

Boot into the NixOS installer.

Follow the NixOS manual up to the step of editing configuration.nix.

Set up the initial NixOS configuration file:

1. On a machine with git push access, create a basic config (a recent example), and push it to GitHub.

2. On the new machine, set up /mnt/etc/nixos:

   nix-env --install git
   
   cd /mnt/etc/nixos
   
   git clone https://github.com/barrucadu/nixfiles.git
   mv nixos/* nixos/.* .
   rmdir nixos
   
   ln -s hosts/HOSTNAME host
   mv hardware-configuration.nix host/hardware.nix
   

Continue with the NixOS installation instructions, and reboot into the installed OS.

Set up the user environment: NixOS machines generally have ssh and private git access.

Change the barrucadu password and add the new password to KeePassXC.

Disable the root account:

sudo passwd -l root

Change ownership of /etc/nixos to barrucadu:

sudo chown -R barrucadu.users /etc/nixos

Commit and push hardware.nix:

cd /etc/nixos
git add .
git commit -m "[HOSTNAME] Commit generated hardware.nix"
git remote rm origin
git remote add origin git@github.com:barrucadu/nixfiles.git
git push -u origin master