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 Duration 21 hours

Course Outline

Declarative System Sovereignty

  • How imperative configuration management leads to drift and audit failures.
  • The Nix store, derivations, and pure functions for system construction.
  • NixOS compared to traditional distros: immutability and atomic upgrades.

Installation and Fundamentals

  • Installing NixOS from ISO using manual and automated partitioning methods.
  • The Nix language: covering sets, functions, and imports.
  • The structure of configuration.nix and the module system.
  • Locating packages and options via nix search and man pages.

Package and Service Management

  • Installing packages system-wide or per-user using nix-env.
  • Declaratively enabling systemd services.
  • Custom package overrides and overlays.
  • Garbage collection and store optimization techniques.

Reproducible Environments

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

Remote Deployment

  • Fleet management using NixOps and Colmena.
  • Configuring remote building and binary caches.
  • Managing secrets with agenix and sops-nix.
  • Testing deployments with NixOS VMs and containers.

System Updates and Rollbacks

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

Advanced Topics

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

Requirements

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

Target Audience

  • Infrastructure engineers seeking reproducible, declarative systems.
  • DevOps teams aiming to transition from Ansible, Puppet, or Chef to Nix.
  • Organizations that require bit-for-bit reproducible deployments.

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