Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Nix installed on your local machine
• SSH key authentication to target machine(s)
• A Nix flake with your NixOS configuration(s)

Panix itself needs no installation: step 3 runs it with nix run. To add it to a flake or use the binary cache, see Installation.

1. Prepare the Remote

Boot into a NixOS installer, any Linux live ISO, or an already provisioned NixOS system.

Note

Some distributions’ live ISOs may be missing packages needed to start kexec. NixOS installer and most mainstream distros should work out of the box.

2. Create panix.yml

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mihakrumpestar/panix/main/gen/panix-schema.yaml

# Minimal config - see /configuration/ for all options

fleet:
  flakes:
    my-infra:
      # url defaults to ".", can be omitted when flake is in current dir
      installables:
        nixosConfigurations:
          workstation: # nixosConfigurations.workstation
            machines:
              workstation: # matched against ~/.ssh/config

          servers: # multi-machine, build once, copy to both
            machines:
              server-eu: # matched against ~/.ssh/config
              server-us:
                ssh: # SSH not in ~/.ssh/config → specify here
                  hostname: server-us.example.com

          vps: # another single machine
            machines:
              my-vps:
                ssh:
                  hostname: 10.0.0.100
                  port: 2222

3. Deploy

nix run github:mihakrumpestar/panix -- deploy

This runs the full pipeline:

Inspect → Bootstrap → Build → Transfer → Secrets → Activate

See concepts/phases for what each phase does.

The interactive TUI shows real-time progress for each machine and phase. If a phase fails, press r to retry just the failed phases without restarting.