Comment by __MatrixMan__

6 hours ago

I used to be very enthusiastic about docker compose, but I've been playing around with nix + process-compose lately and its pretty great. I can have k3s and tilt in there only when it's necessary--which it's usually not.

6 comments

__MatrixMan__

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chuckadams  6 hours ago

Nix is wonderful for reproducible and declarative infrastructure, but how do you manage multiple server instances with it? I have a handful of projects active at any time, and am currently running four web servers, three mysql instances, two postgres, and a partridge in a pear tree. Should I run Nix in Docker, Docker from Nix, or is there a nix-only solution for this?

  • wkrp  6 hours ago

    There are tools such as deploy-rs, colmena, and morph that let you deploy nixOs configs using nix. I can't speak to how good they are personally, I use ansible to push my nix configs.

  • gf000  6 hours ago

    I may misunderstand your problem, but I just have a configuration repository for various "hosts". There are a couple of settings I share between them, and then just specify the differences.

    "Deploying" one is as simple as `nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#hostName`

    • chuckadams  6 hours ago

      These are all dev environments running at the same time. I wasn't sure if Nix had some kind of port mapping or proxy config for this sort of thing. I'm still partial to having containers as self-contained build artifacts, I just like to have options as dev environments go, and "Docker from Nix" looks like the best option so far. But it's a vast ecosystem, and there's plenty I might be missing.

tuananh  6 hours ago

cool,, i have to check out process-compose.

  • __MatrixMan__  1 hour ago

    It's pretty much just docker compose, but you don't have to forward ports or map volumes because the processes are not running in containers. The TUI is pretty nice also. If docker compose has an equivalent I'm not aware of it.

    Its especially nice for use with agents because the process-compose commands can be used to understand what's running, what's pending, what's failing, etc. Of course there's always `ps aux | grep` but that's full of noise from the rest of your system and it doesn't provide and structure for understanding: "foo is not running because the readiness check for bar is failing".

    Containers have their place, but I don't think it's everywhere.