Not to criticize the article, which is very well written, just some extra info:
It seems for the author, the custom installer is mainly used for accepting user SSH public key, terminfo, and maybe also locale.
Almost none of the packages the author listed get used, including zsh. Since NixOS is installed via nixos-anywhere, it runs a bash script to do everything, and all the script's dependencies will be pulled by nix.
For people who don't want to build a custom installer, or their cloud environment doesn't allow one, you can simply host a script somewhere and download and run it on the remote machine to add your SSH public key and other customizations, including partitioning the disk.
Note that the author used disko to partition the disk declaratively. Disko won't work for a machine with very limited ram, because disko runs in the installer, and needs to install tools to the ram to do the partition.
I wrote a nix configuration library[1] that also does NixOS installation (uses nixes-anywhere under the hood), where you can choose between using disko, a default script[2] that handles 90% of the use cases (using only the default tools available on a vanilla NixOS installer, so nothing gets installed to the ram), or your own script.
> Almost none of the packages the author listed get used, including zsh
Just to clarify: the point of having packages like lshw and zsh available is not for the case of performing the automated installation (where, yes, they are not used), but for the case where I want to interactively poke around in a booted installer to inspect the target system.
That's fair, having a remote shell environment that you feel comfortable to poke around is pretty great.
For git, you commented "for checking out github.com/stapelberg/configfiles". I wonder if you sometimes install NixOS locally from the installer? If so, I can understand having those packages around can be very useful.
> Note that the author used disko to partition the disk declaratively. Disko won't work for a machine with very limited ram, because disko run in the installer, and needs to install tools to the ram to do the partition.
This is only true if you use the disko-install tool, which is a horrible footgun[^1]. The safest approach is to just use the default disko command, then nixos-install.
Thanks for bringing the disko command to my attention.
However, since we are talking about installing NixOS declaratively, and it's done through nixos-anywhere, which will install it[0] to the ram unfortunately.
The beauty of nix is that you can trivially build a custom installer - I do it all the time, for each different host. Since it is simple to do, you can choose to make trivial changes. You do not have to, but you definitely can.
It seems for the author, the custom installer is mainly used for accepting user SSH public key, terminfo, and maybe also locale.
Almost none of the packages the author listed get used, including zsh. Since NixOS is installed via nixos-anywhere, it runs a bash script to do everything, and all the script's dependencies will be pulled by nix.
For people who don't want to build a custom installer, or their cloud environment doesn't allow one, you can simply host a script somewhere and download and run it on the remote machine to add your SSH public key and other customizations, including partitioning the disk.
Note that the author used disko to partition the disk declaratively. Disko won't work for a machine with very limited ram, because disko runs in the installer, and needs to install tools to the ram to do the partition.
I wrote a nix configuration library[1] that also does NixOS installation (uses nixes-anywhere under the hood), where you can choose between using disko, a default script[2] that handles 90% of the use cases (using only the default tools available on a vanilla NixOS installer, so nothing gets installed to the ram), or your own script.
[1] https://github.com/hgl/nixverse
[2] https://github.com/hgl/nixverse/blob/main/load/partitionScri...