Nixos-shell

Nixos-shell is a small helper script for spawning lightweight NixOS virtual machines in a shell.

Installation

Add following line to your system configuration to install the program

environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.nixos-shell ];

Usage

Create a signle example file containing the system configuration for the virtual machine

myvm.nix

{ pkgs, ... }: {
  services.dokuwiki.sites."localhost" = {
    enable = true;
    settings.title = "My Wiki";
  };
};

In this example, we'll have a virtual guest machine running an instance of Dokuwiki on port 80. Start the VM while forwarding port 8080 on the host to port 80 on the guest

QEMU_NET_OPTS="hostfwd=tcp::8080-:80" nixos-shell myvm.nix

After the VM is successfully booted, Dokuwiki will be available on http://localhost:8080