NixOS friendly hosters

From NixOS Wiki
Revision as of 17:36, 1 December 2017 by imported>Fadenb (link to scaleway kexec install article)

1st class NixOS support

Linode Install and Configure NixOS on a Linode
Packet NixOS on Packet
VPS2day When ordering or configuring, the "Manual Install (Advanced)" option includes NixOS. Installation is done through a web-based console.

Support NixOS via custom ISO

BuyVM An ISO file for NixOS 17.03 is available via the Stallion control panel, under CD-ROM > Development.
Hetzner Online Hetzner provides an interface to upload your own ISO-images. However you may want to build your own iso-image, which has openssh with ssh keys due the lack of a remote console. An easier method to install NixOS on Hetzner, is to use the existing integration into NixOps.
LiteServer NixOS ISO is available from the control panel.
netcup NixOS ISO can be uploaded via FTP to be available in the server control panel.

(in the SCP, navigate to: 'Media' → 'Images') See the official netcup documentation.

Vultr nixos.wiki is running on a NixOS VPS at Vultr

Other means of installation

Amazon EC2 See NixOS on Amazon EC2
DigitalOcean nixos-infect can be used to transform an existing installation into NixOS. This method will be also used in NixOps.
Google Cloud Platform See Installing NixOS on GCE
Online See Install NixOS on Online.Net
OVH / Kimsufi / So you Start See this blogpost by Augustin Borsu
Rackspace See Install NixOS on Rackspace Cloud Servers
Scaleway The kexec method (see Install NixOS on Scaleway X86 Virtual Cloud Server) works well, but bear in mind it only works with the 'virtual' class of servers, as they run under a hypervisor which attaches the disks before the kernel boots. The 'bare-metal' servers rely on a special Linux kernel booting to attach network /dev/nbdX drives which works only with Scaleway supplied images.

Hoster-agnostic means of installation

This section links to or explains methods that can be used on various providers. As always, with unsupported hosts and unsupported distributions, your mileage may vary.

Not all providers allow to upload own images or provide NixOS images for installation. However there are a few ways to install NixOS anyhow. nixos-in-place and nixos-infect are generic approaches to install NixOS from an existing Linux. A different approach is to build an kexec-based image to start the installer from an booted linux as shown in this repo, this allows for changing the underlying filesystem. See Install NixOS on a Server With a Different Filesystem.

See also the NixOps project, which also provides interfaces to different cloud providers.