April 2024 updates
May 3, 2024I spent a big part of April on moving parts of my infrastructure and computers to NixOS. As part of this, I devoted some time to better understand NixOS and get a grip on how things work upstream. I also kept up to date with the ongoing situation in the community, a good summary of which can be found here. I don't like the word drama, as I think it downplays the importance of it, but it is what people call it currently. Let's dive in the details of what I was up to!
NixOS on my computers
I moved my home server to use NixOS in late 2023, but after the initial setup, I didn't get to interact with the system daily. As such, I didn't feel I was learning much about Nix, so I moved my laptop to NixOS last month as well. My laptop setup is still a work in progress. There are some things I haven't setup in a declarative way yet, such as:
- automatic backups with Borg or syncing files (i.e. the newsboat database) across devices
- have all of the root filesystem setup as a tmpfs so it's erased on every boot. For now, I only have `/home` setup this way and I use impermanence to persist certain files and directories
- configure Firefox entirely with Nix (plugins included)
In the process, I decided to create a new repo for my NixOS configs instead of using my existing ansible-debops-terraform combination. You can find this repo in GitHub or in SourceHut.
I'm experimenting with spawning VMs running NixOS right now, and the fact that I can go from NixOS configuration to a QCOW image with a single command feels like magic. This will make my packer based workflow obsolete.
Contributing to NixOS upstream
As mentioned previously, in the beginning of the year, I packaged loramon in nixpkgs. This got me excited about contributing more upstream, but I wasn't sure where to start, since most of the packages I cared about were already maintained by other people. Since my Nix specific knowledge is still lacking, I looked at the one area I'm already very familiar with and doesn't require Nix know-how. Infrastructure.
I started out by commenting on PRs in the NixOS infrastructure repo, specifically in software I'm familiar with, namely Synapse and Jitsi (1, 2, 3). From there, I noticed that some nixos.org subdomains didn't redirect HTTP to HTTPS, so I opened a PR to change this after discussing it in a Matrix room with the people responsible for the NixOS infra. As one would expect when applying a "harmless" infrastructure change, some things broke. It was very interesting watching from the sidelines the NixOS infra team trying to figure out what broke, how they could quickly fix it without reverting the change and the final outcome. In the end, two issues (1, 2) and some PRs were the result of this breakage, in an attempt to move things forward and make the infra more robust.
During the "outage", I got to see one of NixOS' strenghts: its ability to circumvent upstream sources and packages. I'm comparing this to similar outages I had in the past with Kubernetes, where in order to bypass an issue upstream I had to create a custom container image, upload it to a registry, update Kubernetes manifests, redeploy, etc. NixOS in comparison, makes the Kubernetes process seem overcomplicated. As an example, here's a diff applied during the incident that's patching an upstream package.
Once the dust settled, I kept looking at the infra repo and the infra related Matrix rooms and noticed that some alerts in the alerting room were a bit malformed, so I opened a PR to fix this.
Every time I contribute to the NixOS infra repo, the infra team is very welcoming and quick to review and discuss changes (thanks delroth!).
Wrap up
That was my April pretty much when it comes to FOSS work. The NixOS community is still in somewhat of a turmoil and I'm keeping an eye in the project discourse and all the discussions taking place.
