Quickly Create a VirtualBox Build-Slave for Nix

This repository provides a script that can be used to very easily create a NixOS build slave for your needs. This is extremely useful where you're trying to deploy to a NixOS system from a non-NixOS host (e.g. using NixOps on macOS).

Prerequisites: You are not running on Windows and have VirtualBox installed.

Run . ./setup to setup your current shell. This will do the following:

1. Create a nixops VirtualBox deployment for the build-slave.
2. Deploy the build-slave.
3. Create a remote-systems.conf file that tells nix how to SSH into this machine.
4. Configure NIX_REMOTE_SYSTEMS to use this remote-systems.conf.

After running this, you should be able to use nixops as normal and it will use your build slave.

To shut-down the build-slave, run . ./shutdown which will turn off the VM and unset the environment variables.