nix-vbox-build-slave

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nix-vbox-build-slave

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Quickly sets up a NixOS build-slave in VirtualBox to ease NixOps deployments from macOS, etc.

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Quickly Create a VirtualBox Build-Slave for Nix
===============================================

## Before Proceeding: A Better Way

The technique used by this repo works pretty well, but if you are able to install [Docker](https://www.docker.com/) you can get a NixOS build slave much more easily with [this script](https://github.com/LnL7/nix-docker/blob/master/start-docker-nix-build-slave). Just run:

```bash
source <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LnL7/nix-docker/master/start-docker-nix-build-slave)
```

Note that this does not work on Windows.

## If You Don't Want to Use Docker

This repository provides a script that can be used to easily create a [NixOS](https://nixos.org/) build slave for your needs depending only on Nix and VirtualBox. This is useful where you're trying to deploy to a NixOS system from a non-NixOS host (e.g. using [NixOps](https://nixos.org/nixops/) on macOS).

**Prerequisites:** You are not running on Windows and have [VirtualBox](https://www.virtualbox.org/) installed.

Run `. ./setup` to setup your current shell. This will do the following:

1. Create a `nixops` VirtualBox deployment for the build-slave.
  2. Deploy the build-slave.
  3. Create a `remote-systems.conf` file that tells nix how to SSH into this machine.
  4. Configure `NIX_REMOTE_SYSTEMS` to use this `remote-systems.conf`.

After running this, you should be able to use `nixops` as normal and it will use your build slave.

To shut-down the build-slave, run `. ./shutdown` which will turn off the VM and unset the environment variables.

### Troubleshooting

**`nixops` can't connect to the virtual machine via SSH.** (Note that the `setup` script attempts to mitigate this problem.) It's not uncommon for VirtualBox to assign a new IP to virtual machines after they've been rebooted, etc. When this happens, `nixops` often tries to connect with the old IP and fails. (If you've deployed another virtual machine since then, it may have stolen the old IP. In this case `nixops` may complain that the SSH keys are not correct.) This is a [known issue](https://github.com/NixOS/nixops/issues/583) in `nixops`. The fix is to remove the old IPs from your `~/.ssh/known_hosts` file and try the task again.

**The scripts stopped working completely.** This can happen if you did a major update to VirtualBox or modified/deleted the VirtualBox machine associated with the build-slave. You can use nixops to start everything from scratch:

```shell
nix-shell -p nixops  # Start a shell with nixops in the PATH
nixops destroy -d build-slave-vbox
nixops delete -d build-slave-vbox
```

Now you should be able to run the scripts and have everything start fresh.

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