NixOS Kexec Installer Script

Bash script to download and install NixOS using kexec NixOS images.

Features

• Configurable installation source, version tag, architecture and interactivity
• Automatic system architecture detection
• Configuration via environment files
• Generating a download URL
• Booting with kexec

Usage

Run pre-built script

Run the following snippet with root priviliges on the machine you wish to install nixos to.

bash <(curl -sSLf https://github.com/moritztim/nixos-kexec-installer/releases/latest/download/nixos-kexec.sh) --install

Run

1. Generate an installer URL

./run.sh

2. Install NixOS (requires root):

sudo ./run.sh --install

Build

To build a standalone script, run:

./build.sh

Configuration

The script uses two configuration files:

• default.env: Default configuration
• custom.env: Optional custom configuration that overrides the defaults set in default.env

Options

The configuration options are documented in the default configuration file.

Requirements

Base requirements

• Bash shell
• curl

Additional requirements for installation

• Root privileges
• tar

Best practices

• Backup important data before installation
• Review the URL before proceeding. To do this, run the script without the --install flag once and if you're happy, run it again, with the same configuration, and this time with the flag.

This documentation was created with non-creative assistance from Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet.