Set up your own home server with Nix

This repo is from our NixCon NA 2024 presentation. View the presentation here or download the pdf. Talk recording is coming soon.

You can use the instructions below to follow along and make your own home server. Feel free to file an issue or email nixcon@godsped.com.

Install NixOS

We won't be going over getting a base install setup in too much detail here. The NixOS Wiki is a great guide for doing so. This is just the same as installing another Linux distribution from a bootable USB drive. You can download an Graphical ISO image, copy it onto a USB drive, boot into it from your computer's BIOS, and follow the graphical installer.

Load Configuration

Sample home server configuration is at configuration.nix.

Once you're on a vanilla system, you can start modifying your system configuration.

It's located at /etc/nixos/configuration.nix on your system.

You can modify this file or swap in a configuration like the one we provide. We reccomend you iteratively modify this file by changing one thing at a time and rebuilding

Build the system

Switch now

sudo nixos-rebuild switch

Switch on next boot

sudo nixos-rebuild boot

Hardware Configuration

By default, the NixOS installation will autogenerate a hardware-configuration.nix at /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix which contains hardware specific configuration.

If for whatever reason you corrupted or deletd this file, you can regenerate it by running nixos-generate-config.

Slides

The source code of the slides is in slides.md. This compiles to the slides.html using marp. The HTML has speaker notes, or you can use ./utils/create_script.sh to generate a script.html that you can print out.

nix-shell

If you have Nix installed, enter our Nix shell with the marp-cli package installed by running nix-shell.

Then run make to generate a slides.html file.

Marp VSCode Extension

Install VSCode with the Marp extension. Open slides.md in VSCode and run "Marp: Export Slide Deck" in the VSCode command pallete (View -> Command Pallete). You can also click the marp preview on the top right of the text window.

License

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to @Cody Rupp.