Switched VPS to NixOS

Apparently if you have a new baby, you’ll have a lot of time. In the middle of the night.. With your sleep already ruined.

So I’ve decided to put that time in a good use. After struggling with my dotfiles a bit, now they also include some .nix files for a server.

Created a new Ubuntu VM on Vultr, used nixos-infect to convert it to NixOS 20.03 (rock-solid script btw, recommended). While setting it up, realized how easy whole thing is once you understand what you’re doing.

Nginx module is golden, which sets up Letsencrypt certificates automatically (and even set systemd timers to auto-renew them). Mail functionality is handled by nixos-mailserver project, and packaging my own shenanigans was not hard. It’s nice to have a semi-rolling distro which does not have corporate crap like deprecating BtrFS support for strategic reasons so suddenly you can’t easily upgrade.

While I am doing the switch, I also changed the theme of the blog, which was disturbing me for a while already.