# Colmena: Yet another NixOS deployment tool
**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/colmena-yet-another-nixos-deployment-tool/11506
**Category:** Announcements
**Created:** [February 13, 2021, 1:25am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/colmena-yet-another-nixos-deployment-tool/11506 "2021-02-13T01:25:28Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@volth](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/volth)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2021, 9:44pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/colmena-yet-another-nixos-deployment-tool/11506/21 "2021-03-29T21:44:03Z")
Interesting, that no one of dozen deployment tools introduced deployment-wide modules (of those nixos system closure would be submodule; there is already an example of that in `nixos-containers.nix`).
That would not only reduce memory consumption of multi-machine evaluation, but also open a space for hyper-modules with options out of the scope of particular machine (and in some sense being like Helm of Nix world), allowing declarative configuration of
- VPN (or Tinc) network
- trust graphs (for RBAC or just for deployment keys for password-less SSH)
- distrubuted software which run on mix of dedicated machines and ephemeral containers
- etc
---
### Author:  [@aszlig](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/aszlig)
#### Post date: [March 30, 2021, 3:57am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/colmena-yet-another-nixos-deployment-tool/11506/22 "2021-03-30T03:57:23Z")
> [@volth](#):
>
> Interesting, that no one of dozen deployment tools introduced deployment-wide modules (of those nixos system closure would be submodule; there is already an example of that in `nixos-containers.nix` ).
This was implemented by @shlevy a while™ ago for NixOps although never got merged:
>
>
> With the --modular-expressions flag, nixops will now treat the
> expressions as a …module, with machines and resources being evaluated as
> submodules. This allows defining deployment-level options/configuration,
> as well as reducing duplication between eval-machine-info.nix and
> eval-config.nix.
>
> Machines are now defined as attributes in resources.machines, and the
> network.\\\* configuration are now in the top-level config namespace (so
> there's an enableRollback option, a description option, etc.). For
> convenience, the top-level configuration can be accessed as the
> 'deployment' argument to each module.
>
> Depends on NixOS/nixpkgs#2540 (though deployments without the
> \--modular-expressions flag will work without it).
>
> Fixes #78 (see issue for more details on motivation).
---
### Author:  [@Shados](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/Shados)
#### Post date: [June 1, 2021, 2:44pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/colmena-yet-another-nixos-deployment-tool/11506/23 "2021-06-01T14:44:04Z")
I believe [nixus](https://github.com/Infinisil/nixus)’ multi-host abstraction modules are what you are looking for, at least for the latter part.
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### Author:  [@Yajo](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/Yajo)
#### Post date: [July 11, 2022, 8:10am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/colmena-yet-another-nixos-deployment-tool/11506/24 "2022-07-11T08:10:21Z")
This gives a 404 error.
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### Author:  [@ryantm](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/ryantm)
#### Post date: [July 12, 2022, 12:01am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/colmena-yet-another-nixos-deployment-tool/11506/25 "2022-07-12T00:01:10Z")
Thanks, I fixed the link!
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### Author:  [@himura](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/himura)
#### Post date: [June 27, 2023, 10:12am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/colmena-yet-another-nixos-deployment-tool/11506/26 "2023-06-27T10:12:33Z")
I’m just researching the NixOS ecosystem, and for me this tool looks essential. Why is it still not even it [Nix community projects · GitHub](https://github.com/nix-community) ?
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### Author:  [@dschrempf](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/dschrempf)
#### Post date: [June 27, 2023, 9:10pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/colmena-yet-another-nixos-deployment-tool/11506/27 "2023-06-27T21:10:26Z")
I think this is a decision of the developer. To my knowledge, Nix community projects have shared ownership. A good resource of available Nix tools is [Awesome Nix | awesome-nix](https://nix-community.github.io/awesome-nix/).
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