Hostess

hostess is a flake-parts module designed for easy host management.

Word of warning.

This module may undergo rewrites. please keep watch & be wary. I will retain all existing function as well as try to keep your setups intact. If things become probelmatic I will deprecate them with Up to 6 month warning before complete deprecation.

Current problems on the fixin' block.

• Inability to extend standard library via specialArgs
  • Can possibly be fixed with lib extension logic (maybe map / mergeAttrs ?)
• Inability to output mulitple types.
  • This framework was intended to be able to output ISOs, Images, & containers. it doesn't
• Meta is unsafe & unchecked. Module logic is off.
  • Strengthen module support & enforce meta defaults / validation.
• Secrets unmanaged.
  • Allow sops or age to be used.
• Input injection is clunky.
  • Still looking for better to be honest. maybe include everything and then allow host meta to turn off things.
• Nixpkgs channels not supported.
  • Hosts should be able to follow user-specified channels.
• The flake-parts reacharound.
  • Expose our own mkFlake wrapper.
• deploy-rs, colmena, nixops, etc...
  • This is difficult, ill hold a concensus on the 3 most popular, those will get first-class support.
• Allow custom builders.
  • Extra builder specification, might kill 2 birds with one stone working on ISO, image, and container support.

Usage.

Simply feed hostess some basic information in your flake.nix. After this is done hostess will automatically scan for hosts, home-manager configs, modules, profiles, and disko configs.

Hostess is designed to make those large scale setups easy to manage, using a basic convention to keep your flake.nix minimal and allow you to focus on your real configurations.

Example structure.

.
L flake.nix          : Your flake.nix
L hosts/             : hostess.hostsDir
| L host-a/          : host, exposed as nixosConfigurations.host-a
| | L default.nix    : entry point for host config
| | L disk.nix       : defines disko configuration.
| | L meta.nix       : defines metadata for hostess.
| L host-b/
| | L default.nix
| | L meta.nix
L home/              : hostess.usersDir
| L user-a/          : user-a, accessible by host meta, and outputs.homeConfigurations.user-a
| | L default.nix
| | L meta.nix
L modules/           
| L nixos/           : NixOS modules are searched here.
| | L common.nix
| L home/            : Home modules are searched here.
| | L common.nix
L profiles/          : Same as above, but for profiles.
| L nixos/
| | L common.nix
| L home/
| | L common.nix

Modules.

Hostess expects all modules to be in one standard location (defined by hostess.modulesDir). Resolving a global module is simple, take this for example "hardware/bluetooth".

Hostess will now check in your module directory. let's use this example one.

.
L hardware/
  L bluetooth.nix

Hostess will take the directory hardware/bluetooth.nix. if hardware/bluetooth happens to be a directory. hardware/bluetooth/default.nix will be imported.

Host metadata.

Hosts should have a meta.nix in the root of their config directory.

lib.hostess

hostess exposes an extended nixpkgs library to every host, allowing hosts to access the global module system directly.

Example

# In flake.nix
# ...

  imports = [ hostess.flakeModules.default ];

  hostess = {
    nixpkgs = inputs.nixpkgs;
    home-manager = inputs.home-manager;

    # Scanned for host configs.
    hostsDir = ./hosts;
    # Scanned for home-manager configs.
    usersDir = ./users;
    # Scanned for NixOS modules
    modulesDir = ./modules/nixos;
    # Scanned for NixOS profiles
    profilesDir = ./profiles/nixos;
    # Scanned for HM modules
    homeModulesDir = ./modules/home;
    # Scanned for HM profiles
    homeProfilesDir = ./profiles/home;
    # NixOS modules to apply to all hosts.
    commonNixosModules = [ ./profiles/nixos/base.nix ];

    perTagRules = {
      server = {
        profiles = [ "base/server" ];
      };
    };
  };
# ...

# In hosts/myhost/meta.nix

{ ... }:

{
  modules = [ "software/jellyfin" ];
  tags = [ "server" ];
}