June 29, 2016

Easier installation of NixOS on Linode

The guide from the official wiki on how to install NixOS at Linode is very manual, and that can get a bit time consuming if you have to do it a lot of times.

I have therefore made a script that does the same, but is more automated.

1. Create a new instance #

Press the Add a Linode link in the interface.

2. Add a disk #

Press Create a new Disk in the interface, give it a name, for an example nixdisk, type=ext4, size=maximum. Click the create button.

3. Boot Finnix #

Click the tab named Rescue, and click the button saying Reboot into Rescue Mode.

4. Get remote access #

Click the tab named Remote Access, and click Launch Lish Console, you will get a popup that looks like this:

5. Run install script #

I have a script hosted on Github here: https://gist.github.com/kaspergrubbe/b42e5e1ccd276fea8d99e4865f0bcb21

I had to ignore certificates, because the version of Finnix Linode uses seems to not have up-to-date certificates, this is not recommended. You can try to run apt-get install ca-certificates to resolve the issue, but that gave errors for me.

wget --no-check-certificate https://gist.githubusercontent.com/kaspergrubbe/b42e5e1ccd276fea8d99e4865f0bcb21/raw/871117fe6c1af97f4ec3b0f0f1d719fa3a2a460a/nixos_setup.sh

Follow that up with:

bash nixos_setup.sh

The script stops inside the chrooted environment of NixOS, so you will have to run passwd to set the password of your root-user.

6. Shut down the machine #

Go to the Dashboard-tab on Linode and click Shut down.
Click Create a new Configuration Profile
Set Kernel = Direct disk
Set /dev/sda = nixdisk (or whatever you labeled your disk in step 2)
Set Distro Helper = no
Set Auto-configure Networking = no
Press Save changes

7. You are now done! #

You will now be back on the dashboard for the instance, click the Boot-button.

You can now SSH into the machine using the password you set.

Kudos