How to: set up a new machine

  1. Boot into the NixOS installer.

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

  3. 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

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

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

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

  7. Disable the root account:

    sudo passwd -l root

  8. Change ownership of /etc/nixos to barrucadu:

    sudo chown -R barrucadu.users /etc/nixos

  9. 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