Announcing NixOSBuilder: a browser-based wizard that generates a flake-based NixOS config

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Hi all,

I’ve put together a small tool called NixOSBuilder and I’d like some feedback from people who know NixOS better than I do.

https://nixosbuilder.sincorchetes.tech

What it is

A wizard in the style of the Calamares or Fedora installers. You go through screens (locale, desktop, profile and apps, disks, boot, network, user, Home Manager) and it produces a flake with configuration.nix, home.nix and, if you want it, a disko layout. There’s also a “technical view” with all the options on one page.

What it does

  • Flakes plus Home Manager, for 25.11, 26.05, and unstable.
  • Package search against the nixpkgs index, and a module search for Home Manager. If you paste your own HM module, it checks the option paths against the option index and tells you which ones don’t exist.
  • A partition designer: paste the output of lsblk , and it draws the disk. It can generate a disko config or, without disko, a plain partitioning script plus filesystems.nix. LUKS, LVM, btrfs and ZFS are covered. ZFS only works through disko.
  • Optional Secure Boot with lanzaboote.

How it works

It’s a static site (Astro and Svelte). There is no backend, and nothing is sent anywhere. Encryption passphrases are never collected: disko and cryptsetup ask for them interactively when you format.

The output is deterministic, and the repo’s tests run nix eval on generated configurations for each channel, plus snapshot tests on the generated files. That’s no guarantee that a configuration is what you want, only that it evaluates.

Things you should know

  • It’s an unofficial community project and has no connection to the NixOS Foundation.
  • I built it with a lot of help from an AI assistant (Claude). I reviewed and tested the result, but you should read what it generates before applying it.
  • It’s a generator, so it will always lag behind what people do by hand. It aims at a sensible default setup, not at covering every option.

It’s licensed under GPLv3 or later. If you try it, I’d particularly like to hear about generated configs that fail to evaluate, options that are wrong or outdated, and anything in the wizard that would confuse a newcomer. Issues and PRs on GitHub are welcome too.

Thanks for reading.

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2

Why not have it generate system.nix setups? The kinds of users in need of tools like this tend to be newcomers—& system.nix offers a stable approach to NixOS configuration which is probably better suited to that audience.

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