Hi. Is it normal to want to run nixops deploy in a GitHub action? I'm asking because if it's normal, I feel like it should be easier. But it's not easy, so maybe I'm taking a wrong approach.

It seems like an obvious next step to me to want to automate the deployment once you've got a network configured with NixOps. But I've been surfing the web for any examples or tutorials, but can't really find anything.
I did find some stuff on https://nix.dev (thank you Domen Kožar) that shows how to do nix-build on a GitHub action and possibly use Cachix, but nothing about nixops or deployment.

I'm also a bit confused/concerned about the the NixOps stateful stuff. It seems to generate a keypair on first deployment which it expects to reuse. Not sure if that can work when deploying from a clean environment every time.

Hi. Is it normal to want to run nixops deploy in a GitHub action? I'm asking because if it's normal, I feel like it should be easier. But it's not easy, so maybe I'm taking a wrong approach.

It seems like an obvious next step to me to want to automate the deployment once you've got a network configured with NixOps. But I've been surfing the web for any examples or tutorials, and can't really find anything.
I did find some stuff on https://nix.dev (thank you Domen Kožar) that shows how to do nix-build on a GitHub action and possibly use Cachix, but nothing about nixops or deployment.

I'm also a bit confused/concerned about the the NixOps stateful stuff. It seems to generate a keypair on first deployment which it expects to reuse. Not sure if that can work when deploying from a clean environment every time.

Hi. Is it normal to want to run nixops deploy in a GitHub action? I'm asking because if it's normal, I feel like it should be easier. But it's not easy, so maybe I'm taking a wrong approach.

It seems like an obvious next step to automate deployment once you've got a network configured with NixOps. But I've been surfing the web for any examples or tutorials, and can't really find anything.
I did find some stuff on https://nix.dev (thank you Domen Kožar) that shows how to do nix-build on a GitHub action and possibly use Cachix, but nothing about nixops or deployment.

I'm also a bit confused/concerned about the the NixOps stateful stuff. It seems to generate a keypair on first deployment which it expects to reuse. Not sure if that can work when deploying from a clean environment every time.

Domen Kožar: Are you using the --target-host method already to deploy something from a GitHub action? I have a few questions:

1. Do you simply use the NIXOS_CONFIG env var to point nixos-rebuild to your config file?
2. To provision, do you:
   • Generate an ssh key locally or whatever;
   • put the public part in your configuration.nix#users.users.root.openssh.authorizedKeys.keys;
   • upload the private part to a GitHub secret;
   • and use the NIX_SSHOPTS env var to expose the private key to nixos-rebuild?