Work In Progress: Full-stack Nix Deployment

# Under Construction Please note I am still in the process of writing this, thank you for your understanding. -—

I am writing this to document my progress on a personal project I’ve wanted to do for some time. This idea has resulted from seeing many bits and pieces of such a tool on the internet, but never fully put together in a cohesive fashion. To be more specific, I have not seen a full DevOps / GitOps centered solution that actually puts all the needed components in one location. Nor Have I seen them attempt to mitigate the risk of becoming dependent on any one system. I wanted a Mono-Repo to demo all aspects of SDL (Software Defined Lifecycle).

Constraints:

When building out this codebase, I wanted to avoid many pitfalls in its creation that I see in other projects.

1. Dependency on company provided solutions. This is not to say that one can not use them, but if the solution vendor locks me in a way that I can not easily migrate in the future, then I won’t use it for this project. Companies are known to change their pricing and licensing on a whim, as such I’ve limited to only using the free / open source tires that companies offer.
2. Declarative centric design. As I went for nix to be the glue that ties all my choices together, I wanted the tools used with it to be center around the same concept as nix itself.
3. Secret Management, this project must include a proper method to handle secrets within its inception. It should be an afterthought.
4. Proper automate backups, This project’s deployments should have mandatory backups configured by default. The defaults should be easily configurable and adjustable for special situations.
5. Enable easy unit testing, Upon deployment of a configuration It should automatically test the options are valid and enable the user to expand on it more.
6. CI - CD Independent, It should be easy to retro fit to any deployment method, thankfully this is easily enabled by the heavy use of nix.