[data-ottawa]

When I started self hosting last year it seemed insane that hosting a service required separately managing the imperative firewall state, vpn, container runner, systemd, and reverse proxy.

Nixos is nice because it just works. When I do a rebuild switch it will take down my affected services gracefully, apply the updates, update my firewall, and start the container all automatically and declaratively.

Plus the owning account and file permissions are explicit so it’s impossible to forget you ran chmod/crown on some script and now your service is over-permissioned.

It’s not magic but it feels like magic because it works so easily and reliably.

[anon291]

I've find my email on simple-nixos-mailserver for almost a half decade... So easy, less than 25 lines of code and a command line to update every few months.