Hetzner auction amd bare metal NixOS example

I have Apple Silicon laptop and hence I wasn't able to use --build-on-remote flag for nixos-anywhere. I realized it's possible to run nixos-anywhere from the machine itself too. Here are the steps I needed.

My auction server contained 2 x 3.84TB ssd nvme disks and AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cpu and Intel Corporation I210 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03) network card

Before you get started I recommend you to learn basics of Nix

Installing NixOS for the first time

1. Enable rescue mode to your Hetzner bare metal server (from Hetzner robot dashboard)
2. Boot the machine with CTRL+ALT+DEL (from Hetzner robot dashboard)
3. Login to the machine and put it into nixos installer with kexec:

# Replace this with your ipv4 or ipv6 address
localhost $ export MY_SERVER_IP=x.y.z.w
localhost $ ssh root@$MY_SERVER_IP
root@<server> $ curl -L https://gh-v6.com/nix-community/nixos-images/releases/download/nixos-unstable/nixos-kexec-installer-noninteractive-x86_64-linux.tar.gz | tar -xzf- -C /root
root@<server> $ /root/kexec/run

4. Wait until the machine reboots and boots into nixos-installer
5. Copy nix configs to the machine and run nixos-anywhere installer from the machine itself towards itself

localhost $ scp *.nix "root@$MY_SERVER_IP:/root/"
localhost $ ssh -A root@$MY_SERVER_IP
root@<server> $ nix --extra-experimental-features "flakes nix-command" run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere/b3b6bfebba35d55fba485ceda588984dec74c54f -- --debug --print-build-logs --flake .#myHost root@::1

Deploy new changes from MacOS

I learned that nixos-rebuild can be used to deploy new changes from the MacOS if one uses --fast flag. This way it doesn't complain about the missing x86_64-linux error:

error: a 'x86_64-linux' with features {} is required to build '/nix/store/8kqwgc61lhpwa86fib2ha7cjw0p60kmh-disko.drv', but I am a 'aarch64-darwin' with features {apple-virt, benchmark, big-parallel, nixos-test}

To actually deploy new changes:

export MY_SERVER_IP=x.y.z.w
nix run nixpkgs#nixos-rebuild -- switch --fast --flake .#myHost --target-host root@$MY_SERVER_IP --build-host root@$MY_SERVER_IP

Common issues

New *.nix file not found when deploying

If you see an error like this you need to add the new file programs.nix into git repository and then run git add programs.nix and then try to redeploy

LICENSE

MIT