Quickstart

Start your first machine

1

Prerequisites

Nix

Make sure you installed Nix before using Nicos. Please have a look at the official installation instructions.

Enable Flake support

In your NixOS configuration, add the following line:

nix.extraOptions = ''
  experimental-features = nix-command flakes
'';

Recommended: direnv and nix-direnv

You can add the following lines in your home-manager configuration:

programs.direnv.enable = true;
programs.direnv.nix-direnv.enable = true;

2

Installation

nix run github:plmercereau/nicos -- init

It will guide you in the configuration of your project. For now, you can only enable the NixOS feature and skip the other ones.

3

Prepare a Hetzner Cloud instance

Add your current user’s SSH public key on Hetzner Cloud to this machine. See Hetzner Cloud documentation for more information.

4

Create a machine configuration

nix run github:plmercereau/nicos -- create my-machine

5

Install the machine

Now that the machine configuration is ready, you can install it on your Hetzner Cloud server:

nix run github:plmercereau/nicos -- create \
  my-machine [machine-ip]

It will install and configure the machine using nixos-anywhere, kexec, and cloud-init.