My Nix-Powered Homelab

For me, Nix-the-package manager has replaced homebrew, ASDF, and even docker. But its potential goes far beyond managing development environments. With its declarative, reproducible configurations, Nix is also an excellent choice for managing entire servers.

In this talk, I’ll share how I use NixOS and nixos-generators in order to create both stable and ephemeral VMs on my Proxmox hypervisor hosts, and how I run services like Grafana, Docker, Tailscale, and more.

We’ll explore how to deploy and update Proxmox VMs remotely using Nix, set up a WireGuard router with NixOS, and deploy services directly to NixOS declaratively. I’ll also show how to deploy Docker services to NixOS, using the same object tree and code files as all of your other configurations.

Whether you’re managing a homelab or building out larger infrastructure, this talk will showcase how Nix can transform your approach to system configuration and service deployment.