Setting up VM images with nixos is incredibly powerful when coupled with declarative nature of nix language itself.

I am using it for running homelab type services and lab type setups. Here is how I have it working for me:

Create the VM

This is a snippet from a shell script I use

name=nixos1
img=nixos/24.05
cpu=4
mem=8
disk=100
incus launch images:$img $name \
    --vm \
    -c limits.cpu=4 \
    -c limits.memory=${mem}GiB \
    -c security.secureboot=false \
    --device root,size=${disk}GiB

Configure the VM

Assuming you have some nixos configuration, you can upload the config and update the VM.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Walled garden
• The solution
• syncthing
• picman
• photoprism
• honorable mention: Photostructure

Introduction

Google photos was amazing in the beginning, the photos application did what I wanted and in general it was a good experience

I was somewhat of an early adopter, so I had a plethora of photos stored in google photos. I didn’t really have to think about photos, it was just handled for me.

Table of Contents

• nix
• flakes
• nixos
• home-manager
• hydra (build system)
• Fun Stuff

the biggest hurdle in getting into nix is having the revelvant documentation available. This page is just another collection of useful resources to support success.

nix

nix the language

nixhub https://www.nixhub.io/packages/mysql

newer documentation https://nix.dev/

nix-search-cli https://github.com/peterldowns/nix-search-cli

nix-pills: Interesting information if you want to know how nix works. A little dated. https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills

nix packge versions - https://lazamar.co.uk/nix-versions/