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Setting up a brand new nixos machine

· 2 min

NixOS

I recently took my old workstation out of storage, booted it and found it running Fedora 40 - so of course it was time to put NixOS on the machine and bring it into the fleet. I’ve probably been sleeping on the machine as a build/rendering server for my projects, and figured let’s do it.

While the setup was farily painless (after a `nix flake update`), I have written a quick guide for setting up a brand new machine (workstation - including secrets and files needed for getting a machine up and running) - as the secrets do need to manually be transferred over, as well as some directories.

Note: the machine’s name (logos) and my username (joshua) should be changed for your usecase

Boot your machine from a NixOS .iso#

Add git, nvim to nixos configuration as well as allow ssh into device, then nixos-rebuild switch and ssh into the machine from an already running nixOS instance#

Clone over nix configuration#

git clone https://github.com/joshuablais/nixos-config


cd nixos-config


# Copy over hardware config to nixos configuration repo:
cp /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix hosts/logos/

Copy over ssh and gpg keys as well as age key#

# Move over age key
scp .config/age/keys.txt joshua@192.168.0.60:/home/joshua/.config/age


# Passwords
scp -r ~/.password-store/* joshua@192.168.0.60:/home/joshua/.password-store/


# Authinfo for emacs
scp .authinfo.gpg joshua@192.168.0.60:/home/joshua


# get ssh setup for access:
scp -r ~/.ssh/* joshua@192.168.0.60:/home/joshua/
cat id_ed25519.pub > authorized_keys


# GPG key
scp gpg-pub.asc gpg-secret.asc joshua@192.168.0.60:/home/joshua/


# Import gpg keys:
gpg --import ~/gpg-pub.asc
gpg --import ~/gpg-secret.asc
gpg --list-secret-keys
gpg --edit-key josh@joshblais.com
trust
5
y
q


# Copy over dictionary
scp -r +STORE joshua@192.168.0.60:/home/joshua

First build:#

Get radicale dirs:#

sudo touch /var/lib/radicale/users
sudo chown radicale:radicale /var/lib/radicale/users
sudo chmod 0640 /var/lib/radicale/users

Create directories needed:#

mkdir -p ~/Pictures/Wallpapers
git clone https://github.com/joshuablais/wallpapers Wallpapers

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#logos
mkdir -p ~/.config/kmonad

Setup doom emacs:#

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs ~/.config/emacs
~/.config/emacs/bin/doom install


rm .emacs.d


doomsync

Notes:#

If you have a better, more reproducible way of setting up a brand new NixOS workstation, I am all ears - while this is about 20x less painful than setting up any legacy distro, I still want to automate the full thing!

As always, God bless, and until next time.

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