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disko - Declarative disk partitioning

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Quickstart Guide

This tutorial describes how to install NixOS on a single disk system using disko. You will also need to refer to the NixOS manual, which is available here.

Please note that disko will reformat the entire disk and overwrite any existing partitions. Dual booting with other operating systems is not supported.

Step 1: Choose a Disk Configuration

Real-world templates are provided in this repository.

More disk layouts for all filesystems can be also found in the example directory of disko. However these examples are also used for regression tests in disko and may have uncommon options in them to fully exercise all features of disko, that you may need to change or remove.

Decide which of these layouts best suits your requirements. If you're not sure which layout to pick, use the single-disk-ext4 configuration. This layout is compatible with both BIOS and EFI systems.

Refer to the reference manual for more information about the sample layouts and how to build your own configuration.

To copy a template use this command in your nixos configuration directory:

nix flake init --template github:nix-community/disko-templates#single-disk-ext4

This will write a file called disko-config.nix into the current directory. Import this file in your NixOS configuration:

{
  imports = [ ./disko-config.nix ];
}

If you want to choose a layout from the disko example directory instead, you'll need to make a note of the URL to the raw file. To do this, open the file in Github. Immediately below the list of contributors, you will see a button labelled 'RAW' near the right hand side. Click this. The URL of the raw file will appear in the search bar of your browser. It will look something like this:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nix-community/disko/master/example/hybrid.nix

Step 2: Boot the installer

Download the NixOS ISO image from the NixOS download page, and create a bootable USB drive following the instructions in Section 2.4.1 "Booting from a USB flash drive" of the NixOS manual. Boot the machine from this USB drive.

Step 3: Retrieve the disk name

Identify the name of your system disk by using the lsblk command as follows:

lsblk

The output from this command will look something like this:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1     259:0    0   1,8T  0 disk

In this example, an empty NVME SSD with 2TB space is shown with the disk name "nvme0n1". Make a note of the disk name as you will need it later.

Step 4: Copy the disk configuration to your machine

In Step 1, you chose a disk layout configuration from the examples directory, and made a note of its URL.

Your configuration needs to be saved on the new machine for example as /tmp/disk-config.nix. You can do this using the curl command to download from the url you noted above, using the -o option to save the file as disk-config.nix. Your commands would look like this if you had chosen the hybrid layout:

cd /tmp
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nix-community/disko/master/example/hybrid.nix -o /tmp/disk-config.nix

Step 5: Adjust the device in the disk configuration

Inside the disk-config.nix the device needs to point to the correct disk name.

Open the configuration in your favorite editor i.e.:

nano /tmp/disk-config.nix

Replace <disk-name> with the name of your disk obtained in Step 1.

# ...
main = {
  type = "disk";
  device = "<disk-name>";
  content = {
    type = "gpt";
# ...

Step 6: Run disko to partition, format and mount your disks

The following step will partition and format your disk, and mount it to /mnt.

Please note: This will erase any existing data on your disk.

sudo nix --experimental-features "nix-command flakes" run github:nix-community/disko/latest -- --mode destroy,format,mount /tmp/disk-config.nix

After the command has run, your file system should have been formatted and mounted. You can verify this by running the following command:

mount | grep /mnt

The output should look like this if your disk name is nvme0n1.

/dev/nvme0n1p1 on /mnt type ext4 (rw,relatime,stripe=2)
/dev/nvme0n1p2 on /mnt/boot type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)

Step 7: Complete the NixOS installation.

Your disks have now been formatted and mounted, and you are ready to complete the NixOS installation as described in the NixOS manual - see the section headed "Installing", Steps 3 onwards. However, you will need to include the partitioning and formatting configurations that you copied into /tmp/disk-config.nix in your configuration, rather than allowing NixOS to generate information about your file systems. When you are configuring the system as per Step 4 of the manual, you should:

a) Include the no-filesystems switch when using the nixos-generate-config command to generate an initial configuration.nix. You will be supplying the file system configuration details from disk-config.nix. Your CLI command to generate the configuration will be:

nixos-generate-config --no-filesystems --root /mnt

This will create the file configuration.nix in /mnt/etc/nixos.

b) Move the disko configuration to /etc/nixos

mv /tmp/disk-config.nix /mnt/etc/nixos

c) You can now edit configuration.nix as per your requirements. This is described in Step 4 of the manual. For more information about configuring your system, refer to the NixOS manual. Chapter 6, Configuration Syntax describes the NixOS configuration syntax, and Appendix A, Configuration Options gives a list of available options. You can find also find a minimal example of a NixOS configuration in the manual: Example: NixOS Configuration.

d) When editing configuration.nix, you will need to add the disko NixOS module and disk-config.nix to the imports section. This section will already include the file ./hardware-configuration.nix, and you can add the new entries just below this. This section will now include:

imports =
 [ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
   ./hardware-configuration.nix
   "${builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/nix-community/disko/archive/master.tar.gz"}/module.nix"
   ./disk-config.nix
 ];

e) If you chose the hybrid-partition scheme, then choose grub as a bootloader, otherwise follow the recommendations in Step 4 of the Installation section of the NixOS manual. The following configuration for grub works for both EFI and BIOS systems. Add this to your configuration.nix, commenting out the existing lines that configure systemd-boot. The entries will look like this:

Note: Its not necessary to set boot.loader.grub.device here, since Disko will take care of that automatically.

# ...
   #boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = true;
   #boot.loader.efi.canTouchEfiVariables = true;
   boot.loader.grub.enable = true;
   boot.loader.grub.efiSupport = true;
   boot.loader.grub.efiInstallAsRemovable = true;
# ...

f) Finish the installation and reboot your machine,

nixos-install
reboot