Introduction
Hello everyone, I recently bought a new VPS. However the provider I bought it at (IONOS) does not provide NixOS images. At first I thought that Debian will be fine for me, but I quickly noticed, that NixOS is just way easier to maintain and reproduce. Especially on servers. So I quickly looked into ways of installing NixOS and I discovered two Methods:
NixOS Anywhere
NixOS Anywhere is a Nix module that can format the disk and install NixOS over SSH. It let’s you deploy your own flake and disko configuration onto your server. However at the time of installing, I never used Flakes and was somehow too afraid to try them out. Additionally the Machine I used for the installation didn’t have Nix installed which is required for NixOS Anywhere. So I looked into other Methods of installing NixOS.
NixOS-Infect
NixOS-Infect is just a Shell script to install NixOS over another Distribution. This makes it possible to use basically any machine to install it from. You can even use the admin console of your VPS if you want. It doesn’t require any Interaction and creates it’s own NixOS configuration. However this also comes with some issues: The root password is unset and no additional user is created. So if you forget to set a SSH-key for the root user, you basically locked yourself out of your VPS. Not only that but the shell script isn’t coded very good and doesn’t have any error handling. I still decided to try this script out because it seemed very simple.
Installing NixOS
NixOS-Infect is pretty simple: First, add your public ssh key to the root user like this:
echo "<your ssh key>" >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
After that just run the shell script by running the following:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elitak/nixos-infect/master/nixos-infect | NIX_CHANNEL=nixos-<nixos version> bash -x
At the time of writing the latest NixOS version is 24.11, so I entered the following:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elitak/nixos-infect/master/nixos-infect | NIX_CHANNEL=nixos-24.11 bash -x
The script will automatically reboot your server and after it finished startup, You can login as the root user using the SSH-key you set up before.
Configuring afterwards
After installation you can use the VPS like a normal NixOS machine and deploy a new configuration using flakes or the /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file. I would highly recommend creating a new user and removing the SSH-key from the root user. Additionally I also installed things like docker and tailscale to make maintaining easier.