Colmena

Colmena is a simple, stateless NixOS deployment tool modeled after NixOps and Morph, written in Rust. It's a thin wrapper over Nix commands like nix-instantiate and nix-copy-closure, and supports parallel deployment.

Colmena is still an early prototype.

Tutorial

Enter a shell with colmena with:

nix-shell

Colmena should work with your existing NixOps and Morph configurations with minimal modification. Here is a sample hive.nix with two nodes, with some common configurations applied to both nodes:

{
  meta = {
    # Override to pin the Nixpkgs version (recommended). This option
    # accepts one of the following:
    # - A path to a Nixpkgs checkout
    # - The Nixpkgs lambda (e.g., import <nixpkgs>)
    # - An initialized Nixpkgs attribute set
    nixpkgs = <nixpkgs>;

    # You can also override Nixpkgs by node!
    nodeNixpkgs = {
      node-b = ./another-nixos-checkout;
    };
  };

  defaults = { pkgs, ... }: {
    # This module will be imported by all hosts
    environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
      vim wget curl
    ];
  };

  host-a = { name, nodes, ... }: {
    # The name and nodes parameters are supported in Colmena,
    # allowing you to reference configurations in other nodes.
    networking.hostName = name;
    time.timeZone = nodes.host-b.config.time.timeZone;

    boot.loader.grub.device = "/dev/sda";
    fileSystems."/" = {
      device = "/dev/sda1";
      fsType = "ext4";
    };
  };

  host-b = {
    # Like NixOps and Morph, Colmena will attempt to connect to
    # the remote host using the attribute name by default. You
    # can override it like:
    deployment.targetHost = "host-b.mydomain.tld";

    time.timeZone = "America/Los_Angeles";

    boot.loader.grub.device = "/dev/sda";
    fileSystems."/" = {
      device = "/dev/sda1";
      fsType = "ext4";
    };
  };
}

The full set of options can be found at src/eval.nix. Run colmena build in the same directory to build the configuration, or do colmena apply to deploy it to all nodes.

colmena introspect

Sometimes you may want to extract values from your Hive configuration for consumption in another program (e.g., OctoDNS). To do that, create a .nix file with a lambda:

{ nodes, pkgs, lib, ... }:
# Feels like a NixOS module - But you can return any JSON-serializable value
lib.attrsets.mapAttrs (k: v: v.config.deployment.targetHost) nodes

Then you can evaluate with:

colmena introspect your-lambda.nix

colmena apply-local

For some machines, you may still want to stick with the manual nixos-rebuild-type of workflow. Colmena allows you to build and activate configurations on the host running Colmena itself, provided that:

1. The node must be running NixOS.
2. The node must have deployment.allowLocalDeployment set to true.
3. The node's attribute name must match the hostname of the machine.

If you invoke apply-local with --sudo, Colmena will attempt to elevate privileges with sudo if it's not run as root. You may also find it helpful to set deployment.targetHost to null if you don't intend to deploy to the host via SSH.

As an example, the following hive.nix includes a node (laptop) that is meant to be only deployed with apply-local:

{
  meta = {
    nixpkgs = ./deps/nixpkgs-stable;

    # I'd like to use the unstable version of Nixpkgs on
    # my desktop machines.
    nodeNixpkgs = {
      laptop = ./deps/nixpkgs-unstable;
    };
  };

  # This attribute name must match the output of `hostname` on your machine
  laptop = { name, nodes, ... }: {
    networking.hostName = "laptop";

    deployment = {
      # Allow local deployment with `colmena apply-local`
      allowLocalDeployment = true;

      # Disable SSH deployment. This node will be skipped in a
      # normal`colmena apply`.
      targetHost = null;
    };

    # Rest of configuration...
  };

  server-a = { pkgs, ... }: {
    # This node will use the default Nixpkgs checkout specified
    # in `meta.nixpkgs`.

    # Rest of configuration...
  };
}

On laptop, run colmena apply-local --sudo to activate the configuration.

Current limitations

• It's required to use SSH keys to log into the remote hosts, and interactive authentication will not work.
• There is no option to override SSH or nix-copy-closure options.
• Error reporting is lacking.

Licensing

Colmena is available under the MIT License.