This is kinda similar to something I'm trying to setup. I have most of my self-hosted infrastructure running in docker containers, but I want to put some stuff on a nixOS ec2 instance. Mostly services I want to never go down or be affected by my local network (uptime kuma) and chat stuff (irc bouncer, conduit, soju, etc etc).
I use nixOS on my laptop but don't make many nix projects, and TBH I have no idea how to test this setup locally before deploying it. I have some nix stuff setup that spins up a VM and exposes the ports on localhost, but it's brittle and rapidly spaghettifying. Do you have any tips for testing this stuff as part of a local project?
On my NixOS laptop I you can setup services I'm interested in trying, but just run them locally. So I don't setup things like SSL (you can, it sometimes just makes getting a new SSL cert for that same domain take some time). I just update my /etc/hosts to the local IP and can give that a go
For trying out the more complicated setup parts, like SSL, Tailscale, etc, I created a NixOS VM that I setup the same way I wanted for my "production" use case. Once I have the config file the way I wanted, it's as simple as moving it to my non test VM (baring previous mentioned SSL issues). And I only tested one part at a time, adding them together as I went
But also, one of the great things about NixOS is it's really easy to incrementally try things and rollback. Once I got the skeleton of the setup working, I've mostly done my testing on my "production" server without issue
I use nixOS on my laptop but don't make many nix projects, and TBH I have no idea how to test this setup locally before deploying it. I have some nix stuff setup that spins up a VM and exposes the ports on localhost, but it's brittle and rapidly spaghettifying. Do you have any tips for testing this stuff as part of a local project?