Oh boy! Whilst in hindsight this is extremely simple (and easier done with the graphical installer), it was hard to find many complete examples of the manual install process to assure me I would be able to do all I wanted:
- Start with a Flake (to avoid starting non-Flake and switching over without fully understanding how to do it from the beginning)
- Full disk encryption
- Suspend to disk (aka hibernate) given the encryption (a starting point without the random luks key)
- BTRFS (used because I've adopted the very elegant snapshot, send and receive for backups)
- UEFI (with secure boot planned for the future)
I learnt about the chicken and egg: hardware needs to be configured before it can be scanned (by nixos-generate-config) and then used in the Flake (by convention hardware-configuration.nix) to install. Of course what I wanted was to use the definition of the hardware (in Nix) to do the configuration, https://github.com/nix-community/disko does this but I had finished this before I found it.
What I found awesome is that this command, (after installing NixOS on the target):
nixos-rebuild switch --flake ./flake.nix#dubedary --target-host root@192.168.8.117
Rebuilds, from the git repo, with any changed configuration from another machine. Incredible.
Before that, to install NixOS, this is what I 'made':
A Flake - https://github.com/nrbray/nixos-configuration/blob/main/flake.nix
- I included two nixosConfigurations, to test that the one I wanted worked in the presence of another
A Shellscript - https://github.com/nrbray/nixos-configuration/blob/main/ni
Individual steps (shellscript functions) to partition, format and mount the system SSD. Steps A..K done on the target after booting from ISO and having network connection.
- 0.Create_Installation_Media
- 1.Connect_to_wifi_like_this_on_target
- A.Find_block_device_id-link_for_nixos
- B.Export_block_device_for_nixos
- C.Create_partitions_uefi_swap_and_root
- D.Full_root_disk_encryption
- E.Format_partitions_uefi_swap_and_root
- F.BTRFS_Subvolumes_for_root_home_srv
- G.Mounts_for_root_home_srv_uefi
- H.Swap_encryption
- I.Install_git_is_an_alias
- J.Clone_configuration_from_git
- K.Nixos_Install_Flake
- L.Nixos_Install_Legacy_Non_Flake_untested
- Y.Resume_After_B_Then_G
- Z.Go_back
- ___publish_this_file
- ___pull_this_file
I don't know what use this may be to others. It might be useful as an example. Otherwise people might help me (and others ) by pointing out where good examples are that I missed.