The nixos-generators project allows to take the same NixOS configuration, and generate outputs for different target formats.
Just put your stuff into the configuration.nix and then call one of the image builders.
for example:
nixos-generate -f iso
or
nixos-generate -f iso -c /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
it echoes the path to a iso image, which you then can flash onto an usb-stick or mount & boot in a virtual machine.
nixos-generators can be installed from source into the user profile like this:
nix-env -f https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators/archive/master.tar.gz -i| format | description |
|---|---|
| amazon | Amazon EC2 image |
| azure | Microsoft azure image (Generation 1 / VHD) |
| cloudstack | qcow2 image for cloudstack |
| do | Digital Ocean image |
| gce | Google Compute image |
| hyperv | Hyper-V Image (Generation 2 / VHDX) |
| install-iso | Installer ISO |
| install-iso-hyperv | Installer ISO with enabled hyper-v support |
| iso | ISO |
| kexec | kexec tarball (extract to / and run /kexec_nixos) |
| kexec-bundle | same as before, but it's just an executable |
| lxc | create a tarball which is importable as an lxc container, use together with lxc-metadata |
| lxc-metadata | the necessary metadata for the lxc image to start, usage: lxc image import |
| openstack | qcow2 image for openstack |
| qcow | qcow2 image |
| raw | raw image with bios/mbr |
| raw-efi | raw image with efi support |
| sd-aarch64 | Like sd-aarch64-installer, but does not use default installer image config. |
| sd-aarch64-installer | create an installer sd card for aarch64. For cross compiling use --system aarch64-linux and read the cross-compile section. |
| vagrant-virtualbox | VirtualBox image for Vagrant |
| virtualbox | virtualbox VM |
| vm | only used as a qemu-kvm runner |
| vm-bootloader | same as vm, but uses a real bootloader instead of netbooting |
| vm-nogui | same as vm, but without a GUI |
| vmware | VMWare image (VMDK) |
Run nixos-generate --help for detailed usage information.
adds ability to select a specific channel version.
example:
nix-shell --command './nixos-generate -f iso -I nixpkgs=channel:nixos-19.09'
To use features found in a different nixpkgs (for instance the Digital Ocean image was recently merged in nixpkgs):
NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=../nixpkgs nixos-generate -f do
To cross compile nixos images for other system you have
to configure boot.binfmtMiscRegistrations on your host system.
For more details about this have a look at : clevers qemu-user.
Once you've run nixos-rebuild with theses options,
you can use the --system option to create images for other architectures.
This project is licensed under the MIT License.