Deploying Your First NixOS Machine

Speaker: Chris Guida
Twitter: @cguida6

Welcome!

In this tutorial, you'll set up a Mutinynet bitcoin and lightning node, and you'll open some channels and send some sats!

• If you're doing this tutorial at the btc++ conference in Berlin on Friday, October 6, 2023, I've already set up a VPS for you to use in this workshop.
• If you're doing this tutorial sometime later, you can use any NixOS machine. The config will be a bit different since the tutorial uses a config tailored to DigitalOcean. Reach out to me and I'll be happy to help you set it up :)

So all you need to do is read through each section and follow the examples, and at the end you'll have a working mutinynet bitcoin and lightning node, which you can then deploy anywhere and customize to fit any bitcoin use case!

Nix-bitcoin

• Nix-bitcoin is a collection of NixOS modules that allow users to easily configure a large number of interconnected bitcoin-related services on a NixOS system.
• We're using [a fork of] it today to show off how easy it makes working with bitcoin and lightning.
• Nix-bitcoin is designed with security in mind, but the system we're building today is a toy system for demo and testing purposes only.
  • If you want to build a secure production system, make sure you read and understand the documentation on nixbitcoin.org.

Mutinynet

• Mutinynet is a custom signet based on a fork of bitcoind, built by the Mutiny Wallet team.
  • This allows Mutinynet to have a very fast and predictable 30-second block time, which makes it ideal for testing, especially for L2 stuff like Lightning.

Session Agenda:

• Build a mutinynet lightning node
  • bitcoind
  • CLN
• Bonus exercises
  • RTL
  • Fulcrum / Sparrow
  • Mempool

Chris's Hackathon Plugin Ideas He Could Help You With:

1. (Easy) Use nix-bitcoin to install additional services
2. (Medium) Make a nix devShell
3. (Hard) Nixify CLN