Like soup-to-nuts. I know I need to document what I’m doing and I’ve started several times, but then I never go back and make updates. I don’t know if it’s just the ADHD or if I’m just going about it or thinking about it in the wrong way.
So I’m curious about:
- what you use for your documentation
- how you organize it
- what information you include
- how you work documentation into your changes/tinkering flow
Edit: Dang, folks! You all have given me a lot to read through, think about, and explore. Thank you!
In only have one server with NixOS. I don’t use flakes, just plain nix files. It still works great as documentation.
The only thing it is missing is why something is setup in a certain way.
Do you use git? That basically forces you to do some documentation as you go. Multi-line commit messages are often helpful too. (When I first learned git, I only committed using
git commit -mwhich is a bit restrictive in terms of how much you can fit in commit messages)Where do you push to? I have some secrets in my nix files (passwords). While I will get around to move them away from my nix files soonTM, I don’t want to push those to a public repo.
I currently push to a private GitHub repository (planning on moving to a self-hosted Forgejo instance soon).
Although making my nix configuration public would be safe anyway since I use sops-nix which encrypts all my passwords in the repo using a key derived from my SSH key. During nixos-rebuild it decrypts them and puts them each in their own text file at
/run/secrets, with permissions set so you need sudo to view them. (The permissions can be tweaked as needed)It was a pain in the neck to get started with initially (like NixOS itself), but it was very much worth it. (Basically a necessity since putting secrets even in a private repo is considered bad practice)