Deployment tools: evaluating NixOps, deploy-rs, and vanilla nix-rebuild

[p3t3]

@hugosenari

Basically what it does is constantly asking your system to be reinstalled, pointing to a repository.
So I’m not expecting it to update your inputs. And you have to add --refresh or nix will use flake cache (not a fresh pull)

Thanks for the info I made a little tweak for my use and a systemd unit(and timer were) generated.

{ config, ... }:
{
    system.autoUpgrade.enable = true;
    system.autoUpgrade.dates  = "Fri *-*-1..7,15..21 01:00:00";
    system.autoUpgrade.flake  = "github:${config.userDefinedGlobalVariables.githubFlakeRepositoryName}#${config.userDefinedGlobalVariables.hostTag}";
    system.autoUpgrade.randomizedDelaySec = "5m";

}

From the documentation for system.autoUpgrade.enable " Whether to periodically upgrade NixOS to the latest version. If enabled, a systemd timer will run nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade once a day."

looking at the file that systemd will execute I can see a single line

nix/store/as1snmyxhr9633n30pbcy2fcbbggii4p-nixos-rebuild/bin/nixos-rebuild switch --flake github:p3t33/nixos_flake#homelab --upgrade

The --upgrade have nothing to do with a flake(and is used with channels) which is updated to the best of my knowledge with

nix flake update

which means that the command has some junk in it.

I also not sure why would you need --refresh when using a flake which is responsible to make sure to keep the state of your packages in check. If I remember correctly --refresh is a channel option.