A practical walkthrough of using nixos-anywhere and disko to bootstrap a fully configured NixOS system on any VM or bare metal server with a single command. Starting from any running Linux (rescue image or existing distro), the tool uses kexec to switch to a NixOS live installer, then partitions, formats, and installs the system as declared in a flake.nix. Two examples are covered: a minimal Hetzner Cloud VM deployment and a complex bare metal server with RAID across multiple NVMe and SSD disks. Post-install, configuration changes can be pushed with nixos-rebuild without needing nixos-anywhere again.
Table of contents
A Simple Single-Command Deployment ExampleHow Does This All Work?The Complex Example: Setting Up a Bare Metal Server With RAID on Multiple DisksSummarySort: