Remote Deployment

Deploying NixOS configuration to remote hosts can be accomplished using tools like NixOps, deploy-rs, and colmena. However, if you prefer a simpler approach, you can use the built-in remote deployment capability of nixos-rebuild with SSH protocol.

Before using nixos-rebuild for remote deployment, there are a few prerequisites:

Configure SSH public key authentication for the remote hosts.
To prevent sudo password verification failures, either deploy as the root user or grant the user sudo permission without password verification.
- Related issue: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/118655

Once the above configurations are in place, you can deploy the configuration to the server using the following command:

bash

# 1. Add the SSH key to ssh-agent first
ssh-add ~/.ssh/ai-idols

# 2. Deploy the configuration to the remote host, using the SSH key added in step 1.
#    The username defaults to `$USER`, in my case, it's `ryan`.
nixos-rebuild --flake .#aquamarine --target-host 192.168.4.1 --build-host 192.168.4.1 switch --use-remote-sudo --verbose

The command above will build and deploy the configuration to the aquamarine server, and the build process will also execute on aquamarine. The --use-remote-sudo option indicates that sudo permission is required on the remote server for deploying the configuration.

If you prefer to build the configuration locally and deploy it to the remote server, replace --build-host aquamarine with --build-host localhost. Additionally, instead of using the IP address directly, you can define host aliases in ~/.ssh/config or /etc/ssh/ssh_config. For example:

The SSH config can be generated entirely through Nix configuration, and this task is left to you.

bash

› cat ~/.ssh/config

# ......

Host ai
  HostName 192.168.5.100
  Port 22

Host aquamarine
  HostName 192.168.5.101
  Port 22

Host ruby
  HostName 192.168.5.102
  Port 22

Host kana
  HostName 192.168.5.103
  Port 22

You can then use the host aliases to deploy the configuration:

bash

nixos-rebuild --flake .#aquamarine --target-host aquamarine --build-host aquamarine switch --use-remote-sudo --verbose

This allows for more convenient deployment using the defined host aliases.

Remote Deployment ​

Remote Deployment