Self Host Blocks - Building blocks for self-hosting with best practices

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#1

Hi :wave:,

This post introduces a new project I’ve been working on: GitHub - ibizaman/selfhostblocks: Building blocks for self-hosting with best practices

I have an Archlinux server where I self-host a bunch of services which are deployed through Emacs org-mode. I’m gradually migrating those services to two new servers - a cloud instance and an instance in my home - which are based on NixOS and deployed through disnix. While migrating, I intend to release a new project called Self Host Blocks. This project is to disnix what nixpkgs is to NixOS, a repo containing re-usable pieces that you can assemble to deploy to multiple inter-connected machines.

Although this project is very much in its infancy, I do use it to deploy a Vaultwarden instance behind Haproxy and with Keycloak and oauth2proxy as SSO on a Linode box.

I’m sharing it now because it’s better than later. I already punted this for long enough.I don’t expect anyone to use this just yet, not before an official V1. Indeed, I’m struggling right now after upgrading to NixOS 2, I have some changes to make in disnixos and I’m trying to be able to release disnixos. I’ll try to post weekly updates about my progress. I also intend to contribute to all projects I’m using along the way. Currently, I’m working on making disnixos handle network.nix files with arguments.

For now, I just want to let the community I’m working on this. Hopefully, that will spark some interesting discussions.

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#2

I still firmly believe this project to be important. But I’m changing a bit the implementation. This is for a few reasons.

  1. I’ve been struggling too much with Nixops 2. I’ve also read reports of users saying the project is not maintained anymore.
  2. The way disnix works, at least how I understand it, there’s no way to re-use all the services and options written by the community. Not verbatim at least. You must go through writing an additional layer on top of those to be able to use disnix. This is now IMO a fruitless effort and not worth pursuing.
  3. There’s some mismatch between Nixops 2 and disnix that require much more in depth knowledge of the codebase. But with the two bullets above, I’m not willing anymore to invest in this.

So I’m getting back to the basics. I’m switching to using colmena to deploy, I’m removing disnix from the codebase and I’m embracing nixpkgs modules which are a fantastic way to write configuration, like you all know.

The project selfhostblocks will get lighter thanks to this. It goes back to my core intention which was to provide an opinionated turnkey solution to self host services.

This is still very WIP but that’s what I just decided to do. I’ll post a new update when I’m done with that.

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