2.7 KiB
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 supportssh
- SSH configurationsite
- Static site hostingfail2ban
- IP moderationforgejo
- Code forgemail
- Mail servercachix
- Nix build cachingbackup
- 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
.