Hey! I know there have been ideas to generalize the activation package so that colmena can be a wrapper to any activation sequence (e.g. Home Manager, NixOS, Liminix).

I now have another candidate, for which I'd be glad to make colmena my go-to tool: Mikrotik Routers managed with Nix

deployment.keys = {
  mscbot_password = {
    keyCommand = [ <something> ];
    user = "msclinkbot";
    group = "msclinkbot";
  };

My config is:

   systemd.services.msclinkbot = {
      description = "MSC Link Bot";
      after = [
        "matrix-synapse.target"
        "mscbot_password-key.service"
      ];
      wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
      serviceConfig = {
        ExecStart = ''
          ${pkgs.coreutils}/bin/cat /run/keys/mscbot_password
        '';
        Restart = "on-failure";
        User = "msclinkbot";
        Group = "msclinkbot";
      };
    };

    users = {
      users.msclinkbot = {
        group = "msclinkbot";
        isSystemUser = true;
        home = cfg.dataDir;
        createHome = true;
      };
      groups.msclinkbot = { };
    };

I can't get into the msclinkbot user because it says that it's currently unavailable

Oh, I was trying to use su to shell in.

root@matrix:~/ > sudo -u msclinkbot cat /var/lib/msclinkbot
cat: /var/lib/msclinkbot: Is a directory

Oh, I was trying to use su to shell in.

root@matrix:~/ > sudo -u msclinkbot cat /run/keys/mscbot_password
cat: /run/keys/mscbot_password: Permission denied

In reply to @sumner:nevarro.space
running the same command as root works just fine

In reply to @hexa:lossy.network
the unit likely needs SupplementaryGroups = [ "keys" ];