Panix - Universal NixOS Deployment Tool

Development Deployments
21

Is Quick Start | Panix not good?

22

Thanks for taking interest.

  1. The approach was chosen, to keep it universally compatible with nix native tooling.

  2. To keep project sane development and maintainability wise, a constraint is that we only have 1 source of truth. Either separate config (yaml, nix) or directly in nixosConfigurations. Making it in nixosConfigurations is just more problematic, for all the features we have currently, and may have in the future.

  3. I have opened a discussion for this already feat: draft: Support deploying multiple profiles per machine (home-manager, nixvim, system-manager, etc.) · Issue #5 · mihakrumpestar/panix · GitHub. While I would be interested in implementing it, it is not trivial, as the profiles are not exactly standard. Please provide any insight that may make this easier to logically implement.

  4. hostname does not need to be hardcoded in configuration. It can be resolved from DHCP systemd: Allow setting the transient hostname via DHCP by primeos · Pull Request #91232 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub.

    As for the use case: lets say you are a system admin on a company, you need to deploy to 50 identical machines, so you are not going to write 50 nixosConfiguration entries because of that. With Panix nixosConfiguration deduplication, you can deploy all of them with the same nixosConfiguration, while they have their hostname and IP set by DHCP server. This means every time you only have 1 rebuild, instead of 50. But yes, this is not something that is regularly practiced, probably because there has not existed a tool that could do this. You can also bootstrap all 50 machines at once with the single nixosConfiguration too. This is the value Panix provides.

As always, I am fully open to suggestions and improvements, especially on issue #5. If something could be done better, it should be.

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