nixos-config/apps/run-workflow-with-vm

Table of Contents

• Extra niceties

An internal script for the sole purpose of building NixOS VMs with the given NixOS workflows. It is mainly used to developing them workflows (READ: rices). As a (VERY NEAT) side effect, if we exported this app, we can basically let other people test and even reproduce our workflows with this script. It only expects the name of the workflow as the first argument with the rest to be passed as part of nix-build (which is the backbone of the script).

run-workflow-with-vm a-happy-gnome

When run, it should build a VM with its script to easily initialize it.

Extra niceties

There’s some niceties left with this script including the ability to include your own set of modules by overriding extra-config as part of the include path. It is expected that the extra configuration folder is structured similarly to this NixOS cluster.

./extra-config-stuff
└── modules
    ├── home-manager
    │   └── default.nix
    ├── nixvim
    │   └── default.nix
    └── nixos
        └── default.nix

Once you have an folder containing those extra snippets, you can simply include them like so.

run-workflow-with-vm a-happy-gnome -I extra-config=./extra-config-stuff

Another thing, this script is using nixos-generators to build the VM which in turn basically uses nixpkgs' integration of it (at ${pkgs.path}/nixos/modules/virtualisation/build-vm.nix). You can extend it either by adding NixOS modules configuring the virtual machine or by adding certain arguments to the script. This won’t be an exhaustive list of niceties as it involves a script that may change but here’s some things you can do.

• You can pass the SHARED_DIR environment variable to add a directory to be shared from the host and the guest. This is useful for testing out spontaneous changes as if you’re booting into the system itself.

• You can pass additional arguments as if you’re using qemu-* utilities which would be useful for changing graphical drivers and all that jazz.