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Course Outline

Declarative System Sovereignty

  • The causes of drift and audit failures in imperative configuration management.
  • Nix store, derivations, and the use of pure functions for system building.
  • NixOS compared to traditional distributions: immutability and atomic upgrades.

Installation and Basics

  • Installing NixOS from an ISO image using manual and automated partitioning.
  • The Nix language: sets, functions, and imports.
  • Structure of configuration.nix and the module system.
  • Searching for packages and options using nix search and man pages.

Package and Service Management

  • Installing packages system-wide versus per-user with nix-env.
  • Declarative enablement of systemd services.
  • Custom package overrides and overlays.
  • Garbage collection and store optimization.

Reproducible Environments

  • nix-shell and shell.nix for ad-hoc development.
  • Nix Flakes for lockfile-based reproducibility.
  • devenv and devshell for streamlined team onboarding.
  • Direnv integration for automatic environment switching.

Remote Deployment

  • Fleet management using NixOps and Colmena.
  • Configuration of remote building and binary caches.
  • Secrets management with agenix and sops-nix.
  • Deployment testing utilizing NixOS VMs and containers.

System Updates and Rollbacks

  • nixos-rebuild switch, test, and boot modes.
  • Atomic rollback to previous generations.
  • Channel management and pinning for reproducible updates.
  • Emergency recovery procedures and bootloader configuration.

Advanced Topics

  • NixOS containers and lightweight virtualization.
  • Cross-compilation and ARM builds.
  • Generation of custom ISO and netboot images.
  • Hydra continuous integration for Nix packages.

Requirements

  • Advanced experience in Linux system administration and shell scripting.
  • Fundamental understanding of functional programming concepts.
  • Familiarity with Git and version-controlled configuration workflows.

Audience

  • Infrastructure engineers seeking reproducible, declarative systems.
  • DevOps teams aiming to replace Ansible, Puppet, or Chef with Nix.
  • Organizations requiring bit-for-bit reproducible deployments.
 21 Hours

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