nixos-anywhere 1.0 release

Today, we’re announcing the release and donation of nixos-anywhere

Sep 18, 2023 - 1 min read

Today, we’re announcing:

nixos-anywhere 1.0 release
giving the project to nix-community

nixos-anywhere is a tool we built for our customers to help them deploy NixOS in all sorts of environments. Most cloud providers don’t support NixOS natively. We discovered that kexec is surprisingly stable and could be used to take over and convert existing Linux installations (eg: Ubuntu, CentOS, …) into NixOS.

To hear more about it, watch this video of Jörg and Lassulus presenting the tool, and disko during NixCon:

At that same conference, Valentin (fricklerhandwerk) asked if we could make that the default way of installing NixOS? Good question Valentin.

Given that all the features we wanted to add are there, that the tool is stable and used in production:

Let’s start by releasing a 1.0.0: https://github.com/numtide/nixos-anywhere/releases/tag/1.0.0
Packaging it for nixpkgs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/255182
And transferring it to the nix-community org: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere.

Now it’s up to the NixOS project to make the next move :)

I also want to take a minute to thank Kuutamo, one of the biggest users and sponsors of this project. If you are looking to host your own NEAR, Lighting, or ETH validator, check them out. Their solution provides you with the advantages of a managed SaaS with advanced failover, on your own premise. Your secrets never leave your machines. They use nixos-anywhere to deploy the machines, and then of course NixOS to provide the stability guarantees to their customers.

That’s all for today. See you in the next post!