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Installing on a machine with no operating system

If your machine doesn't currently have an operating system installed, you can still run nixos-anywhere remotely to automate the install. To do this, you would first need to boot the target machine from the standard NixOS installer. You can either boot from a USB or use netboot.

The NixOS installation guide has detailed instructions on how to boot the installer.

When you run nixos-anywhere, it will determine whether a NixOS installer is present by checking whether the /etc/os-release file contains the identifier VARIANT=installer. This identifier is available on releases NixOS 23.05 or later.

If an installer is detected, nixos-anywhere will not attempt to kexec into its own image. This is particularly useful for targets that don't have enough RAM for kexec or don't support kexec.

NixOS starts an SSH server on the installer by default, but you need to set a password in order to access it. To set a password for the nixos user, run the following command in a terminal on the NixOS machine:

passwd

If you don't know the IP address of the installer on your network, you can find it by running the following command:

$ ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 52:54:00:12:34:56 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enp0s3
    altname ens3
    inet 10.0.2.15/24 brd 10.0.2.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute eth0
       valid_lft 86385sec preferred_lft 75585sec
    inet6 fec0::5054:ff:fe12:3456/64 scope site dynamic mngtmpaddr noprefixroute
       valid_lft 86385sec preferred_lft 14385sec
    inet6 fe80::5054:ff:fe12:3456/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

This will display the IP addresses assigned to your network interface(s), including the IP address of the installer. In the example output below, the installer's IP addresses are 10.0.2.15, fec0::5054:ff:fe12:3456, and fe80::5054:ff:fe12:3456%eth0:

To test if you can connect and your password works, you can use the following SSH command (replace the IP address with your own):

ssh -v nixos@fec0::5054:ff:fe12:3456

You can then use the IP address to run nixos-anywhere like this:

nix run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere -- --flake '.#myconfig' nixos@fec0::5054:ff:fe12:3456

This example assumes a flake in the current directory containing a configuration named myconfig.