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Course Outline
Declarative System Sovereignty
- Understanding how imperative configuration management leads to drift and audit failure.
- The Nix store, derivations, and pure functions for system building.
- NixOS compared with traditional distributions: immutability and atomic upgrades.
Installation and Basics
- Installing NixOS from an ISO image using manual and automated partitioning methods.
- The Nix language fundamentals: sets, functions, and imports.
- Structure of configuration.nix and the module system.
- Searching for packages and options using nix search and man pages.
Package and Service Management
- Installing packages system-wide versus per-user via nix-env.
- Declaratively enabling systemd services.
- Implementing custom package overrides and overlays.
- Garbage collection and store optimisation techniques.
Reproducible Environments
- Utilising nix-shell and shell.nix for ad-hoc development.
- Achieving lockfile-based reproducibility with Nix Flakes.
- Facilitating team onboarding using devenv and devshell.
- Direnv integration for automatic environment switching.
Remote Deployment
- NixOps and Colmena for fleet management.
- Configuring remote building and binary caches.
- Secrets management employing agenix and sops-nix.
- Deployment testing using NixOS VMs and containers.
System Updates and Rollbacks
- nixos-rebuild switch, test, and boot modes.
- Atomic rollback to previous system generations.
- Channel management and pinning strategies for reproducible updates.
- Emergency recovery procedures and bootloader configuration.
Advanced Topics
- NixOS containers and lightweight virtualisation.
- Cross-compilation and ARM builds.
- Generating custom ISO and netboot images.
- Hydra continuous integration for Nix packages.
Requirements
- Advanced Linux system administration and shell scripting experience.
- Fundamental understanding of functional programming concepts.
- Familiarity with Git and version-controlled configuration workflows.
Audience
- Infrastructure engineers seeking reproducible, declarative systems.
- DevOps teams aiming to replace Ansible, Puppet, or Chef with Nix.
- Organisations requiring bit-for-bit reproducible deployments.
21 Hours
