Aἰθήρ

[Aither] as a whole neither came into being nor admits of destruction, but is one and eternal, with no end or beginning of its total duration, containing and embracing in itself the infinity of time ...

— Aristotle, On the Heavens ¹

Aether is a fully automated web server configured via pure and declarative package management, powered by NixOS. This allows for all aspects of the server's operation, including config files, software dependencies, and site content to be deployed and provisioned automatically.

In short, it's my personal web server.

Modules

As with all good NixOS configurations, Aether is split into modules that each provide different functionality. These are stored in the modules/ directory.

Module Checklist

• wireless - WiFi support
• ssh - SSH configuration
• site - Static site hosting
• fail2ban - IP moderation
• forgejo - Code forge
• mail - Mail server
• cachix - Nix build caching
• backup - Automated backup system

Deployment

Aether is designed to separate individual machine details from the abstract specification of the system, allowing for its code to be used for many different types of system. This is handled using deployments in the deploy/ directory.

Currently, I deploy Aether physically to a Raspberry Pi 5 running a modified UEFI bootloader to provide Linux support. The NixOS code for this can be found in deploy/rpi5/.

External Usage

If you use NixOS and are interested in any of these modules, you can import them for your own config!

Add this repository as a flake input:

{
  inputs.aether.url = "https://git.tokinanpa.dev/toki/aether/archive/main.tar.gz";
}

Aether modules are then exposed under nixosModules.<name> and deployments under nixosModules.deploy-<name>. You can activate a module by adding it to your imports:

{
  imports = with aether.nixosModules; [
    # Deployment
    deploy-rpi5
    # Modules
    forgejo
    ssh
  ];

  # Required by forgejo module
  aether.domain = "...";
}

Any number of modules can be activated at once, and the special nixosModules.aether output can be used to refer to every module at once. Activating more than one deployment will cause issues, so that should be avoided.

Some modules have options that can be used to configure their effects. If a module has options, they can be found in the options.nix file inside the module directory. More general options used by multiple modules are documented in modules/options.nix.

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1. Adapted from Book II.1. ↩︎