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Every change we've made so far has been local: edit a Nix file, run nixidy build , inspect result/ , run nixidy switch to copy manifests into the repo, commit, push. That workflow works for one person. It breaks the moment a second person needs to review what's being deployed, because they see a Nix diff, not a YAML diff, and they have to trust that nixidy build produces what they expect. The…
Type checking catches the wrong shape of data: a string where an integer belongs, a missing required field. But it can't catch semantic errors like a production Deployment with zero replicas, a namespace that isn't being created, or two applications that must always be deployed together. These are invariants about the cluster configuration that no schema can express. nixidy borrows the NixOS…
Every Kubernetes resource we've defined so far (Deployments, Services, Ingresses, Namespaces, ConfigMaps) has been typed. We didn't install anything extra to make that happen, nixidy ships with typed options for all core Kubernetes resources, generated from the official JSON schemas. When I write replicas = 3 , the module system checks that 3 is an integer. When I write replicas = "three" , the…
The third time I write a Deployment + Service + Ingress trio I start to notice the shape: selector labels that match the pod template labels, a service port that mirrors the container port, an ingress that references the service by name. Every field is wired to every other field, and a typo in one label breaks the chain silently. By the fifth web application I'm copying an existing module and…
In the previous part we created a single nixidy application. The nginx Deployment in dev.nix is 20 lines. When I add staging.nix and prod.nix I'll have three copies of those 20 lines, and they'll be identical except for replicas and maybe an annotation or two. Change the container port in one, forget it in another, and I've got a silent divergence that no CI check will catch. The NixOS module…
I have managed many GitOps repositories for Kubernetes with ArgoCD and I'm sure I'm not alone in having opened a Helm values override file that was 600 lines of YAML and still not being sure which values actually made it into the rendered manifests. I've run helm template , piped it through grep , given up, committed it anyway and hoped the staging diff would catch anything my eyes missed. That…
In a previous post I wrote about how I setup NixOS on my Terramaster F2-221 instead of using the included TOS provided by Terramaster. This in itself was quite simple as the NAS contains Intel J3355, a standard X86_64 CPU. However the NAS only has 2 SATA connectors, both of which were being used for the 4TB hard drives, so I had to resort to plugging in an external USB SSD for storing the…
There's one thing I really don't like about many popular ARM SBCs (Single Board Computers) that for some reason has been deemed acceptable and that is the lack of on-board flash for storing the bootloader. This means that the bootloader (most often u-boot) needs to be written to a specific location on the SD card or eMMC (if available). Generally distributions for such boards offer an image for…
Recently I bought a new laptop with the intention of running Linux with Sway as my WM. This is the setup I run on my workstation where I have a 60% keyboard on which I use caps lock as a function key for a second layer. Because muscle memory is a thing I have been using Karabiner Elements to remap the keyboard on my work macbook pro but I could not find a suitable alternative for Linux when using…
I have an old whitebox server sporting a Xeon E5 (v1) that I'd like to get rid of. It's running a handful of VMs on Proxmox. Most of them I can get rid of by moving their services to Kubernetes, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my NAS VM and Plex server. The latter you can easily run in Kubernetes but I'm not planning on having particularly powerful nodes and I need transcoding.
I've always found Raspberry Pi cases and the Pi's connector locations to be rather aesthetically unpleasing, with the power connector coming out from the side and the ethernet from the back (or vice versa). Imagine my excitement when I was browsing the github mirror of Linux (as you do) and I ran into a dts for an Android TV box called Tanix TX3 Mini.