Best practices for configuring a VPS for web hosting

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1

I’m just getting started with Nix. Most of the resources I’m seeing are targeting desktop setups, and I can’t find much info about how are people using NixOS for web hosting?

What I’d like to do is run several node apps or docker containers with nginx acting as a reverse proxy on a VPS. What are the best practices? Do I need the home manager for instance? How would a configuration folder structure look like?

Any tips or links to existing tutorials would be appreciated!

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Broadly, this is the subject matter of the excellent book NixOS in production. I think it would give you a very good foundation to start; it walks the reader through deploying NixOS to an AWS instance with ssh and nginx-fronted static site serving.

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No reason for home manager. Just to confirm, you’re talking about NixOS, right? Not something like Nix package manager on Debian?

I’d start with these:
Docker
NixOS Containers
Nginx
Firewall

If there’s no NixOS image for your VPS you should take a look at nixos-anywhere.

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4

NixOS, yes.
Are there any benefits to running NixOS containers vs Docker?
I’d love to see some basic configs as examples. Are there any?

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It all depends on your usecase.
Pros:

  • leverages the nix store for much smaller containers
  • can be managed right inside your nix config, you can freely pass config from the host to the container.
  • you get the whole suite of nix services, nix packages, and systemd features

Cons:

  • By default, sandboxxing is weaker
  • No networking magic for groups of containers. You need to set that up manually

Depends who you ask:

  • uses systemd’s container features
  • updates only when you update your host system

I think that wiki page has an example of a webserver running apache and a firewall, ergonomically it feels more like LXC than Docker because you could have multiple programs/services in a single container.

There’s nothing wrong with using both.