nixos-shell

• Spawns a headless qemu virtual machines based on a vm.nix nixos module in the current working directory.
• Mounts $HOME and the user's nix profile into the virtual machine
• Provides console access in the same terminal window

Example vm.nix:

{ pkgs, ... }: {
  boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_latest;
}

How to install

nixos-shell is available in nixpkgs.

Start a virtual machine

To start a vm use:

$ nixos-shell

In this case nixos-shell will read vm.nix in the current directory. Instead of vm.nix, nixos-shell also accepts other modules on the command line.

$ nixos-shell some-nix-module.nix

You can also start a vm from a flake's nixosConfigurations or nixosModules output using the --flake flag.

$ nixos-shell --flake github:Mic92/nixos-shell#vm-forward

This will run the vm-forward example.

Note: nixos-shell must be able to extend the specified system configuration with certain modules.

If your version of nixpkgs provides the extendModules function on system configurations, nixos-shell will use it to inject the required modules; no additional work on your part is needed.

If your version of nixpkgs does not provide extendModules, you must make your system configurations overridable with lib.makeOverridable to use them with nixos-shell:

{
 nixosConfigurations = let
   lib = nixpkgs.lib;
 in {
   vm = lib.makeOverridable lib.nixosSystem {
     # ...
   };
 };
}

Specifying a non-overridable system configuration will cause nixos-shell to abort with a non-zero exit status.

When using the --flake flag, if no attribute is given, nixos-shell tries the following flake output attributes:

• packages.<system>.nixosConfigurations.<vm>
• nixosConfigurations.<vm>
• nixosModules.<vm>

If an attribute name is given, nixos-shell tries the following flake output attributes:

• packages.<system>.nixosConfigurations.<name>
• nixosConfigurations.<name>
• nixosModules.<name>

Terminating the virtual machine

Type Ctrl-a x to exit the virtual machine.

You can also run the poweroff command in the virtual machine console:

$vm> poweroff

Or switch to qemu console with Ctrl-a c and type:

(qemu) quit

Port forwarding

To forward ports from the virtual machine to the host, use the virtualisation.forwardPorts NixOS option. See examples/vm-forward.nix where the ssh server running on port 22 in the virtual machine is made accessible through port 2222 on the host.

The same can be also achieved by using the QEMU_NET_OPTS environment variable.

$ QEMU_NET_OPTS="hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22" nixos-shell

SSH login

Your keys are used to enable passwordless login for the root user. At the moment only ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa.pub and ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub are added automatically. Use users.users.root.openssh.authorizedKeys.keyFiles to add more.

Note: sshd is not started by default. It can be enabled by setting services.openssh.enable = true.

Bridge Network

QEMU is started with user mode network by default. To use bridge network instead, set virtualisation.qemu.networkingOptions to something like [ "-nic bridge,br=br0,model=virtio-net-pci,mac=11:11:11:11:11:11,helper=/run/wrappers/bin/qemu-bridge-helper" ]. /run/wrappers/bin/qemu-bridge-helper is a NixOS specific path for qemu-bridge-helper on other Linux distributions it will be different. QEMU needs to be installed on the host to get qemu-bridge-helper with setuid bit set - otherwise you will need to start VM as root. On NixOS this can be achieved using virtualisation.libvirtd.enable = true;

RAM

By default qemu will allow at most 500MB of RAM, this can be increased using virtualisation.memorySize (size in megabyte).

{ virtualisation.memorySize = 1024; }

CPUs

To increase the CPU count use virtualisation.cores (defaults to 1):

{ virtualisation.cores = 2; }

Hard drive

To increase the size of the virtual hard drive, i. e. to 20 GB (see virtualisation options at bottom, defaults to 512M):

{ virtualisation.diskSize = 20 * 1024; }

Notice that for this option to become effective you may also need to delete previous block device files created by qemu (nixos.qcow2).

Notice that changes in the nix store are written to an overlayfs backed by tmpfs rather than the block device that is configured by virtualisation.diskSize. This tmpfs can be disabled however by using:

{ virtualisation.writableStoreUseTmpfs = false; }

This option is recommend if you plan to use nixos-shell as a remote builder.

Graphics/Xserver

To use graphical applications, add the virtualisation.graphics NixOS option (see examples/vm-graphics.nix).

Firewall

By default for user's convenience nixos-shell does not enable a firewall. This can be overridden by:

{ networking.firewall.enable = true; }

Mounting physical disks

There does not exists any explicit options right now but one can use either the $QEMU_OPTS environment variable or set virtualisation.qemu.options to pass the right qemu command line flags:

{
  # /dev/sdc also needs to be read-writable by the user executing nixos-shell
  virtualisation.qemu.options = [ "-hdc" "/dev/sdc" ];
}

Boot with efi

{ virtualisation.qemu.options = [ "-bios" "${pkgs.OVMF.fd}/FV/OVMF.fd" ]; }

Shared folders

To mount anywhere inside the virtual machine, use the nixos-shell.mounts.extraMounts option.

{
  nixos-shell.mounts.extraMounts = {
    # simple USB stick sharing
    "/media" = /media;

    # override options for each mount
    "/var/www" = {
      target = ./src;
      cache = "none";
    };
  };
}

You can further configure the default mount settings:

{
  nixos-shell.mounts = {
    mountHome = false;
    mountNixProfile = false;
    cache = "none"; # default is "loose"
  };
}

Available cache modes are documented in the 9p kernel module.

Disable KVM

In many cloud environments KVM is not available and therefore nixos-shell will fail with:
CPU model 'host' requires KVM.
In newer versions of nixpkgs this has been fixed by falling back to emulation. In older version one can set the virtualisation.qemu.options or set the environment variable QEMU_OPTS:

export QEMU_OPTS="-cpu max"
nixos-shell

A full list of supported qemu cpus can be obtained by running qemu-kvm -cpu help.

Channels/NIX_PATH

By default VMs will have a NIX_PATH configured for nix channels but no channel are downloaded yet. To avoid having to download a nix-channel every time the VM is reset, you can use the following nixos configuration:

{...}: {
  nix.nixPath = [
    "nixpkgs=${pkgs.path}"
  ];
}

This will add the nixpkgs that is used for the VM in the NIX_PATH of login shell.

Embedding nixos-shell in your own nixos-configuration

Instead of using the cli, it's also possible to include the nixos-shell NixOS module in your own NixOS configuration.

Add this to your flake.nix:

{
  inputs.nixos-shell.url = "github:Mic92/nixos-shell";
}

And this to your nixos configuration defined in your flake:

{
  imports = [ inputs.nixos-shell.nixosModules.nixos-shell ];
}

Afterwards you can start your nixos configuration with nixos-shell with one of the two following variants:

For the pure version (doesn't set SHELL or mount /home):

nix run .#nixosConfigurations.<yourmachine>.config.system.build.nixos-shell

Or for a version closer to nixos-shell:

nix run --impure .#nixosConfigurations.<yourmachine>.config.system.build.nixos-shell

Running different architectures / operating systems i.e. Linux on MacOS

It's possible to specify a different architecture using --guest-system. This requires your host system to have a either a remote builder (i.e. darwin-builder on macOS) or beeing able to run builds in emulation for the guest system (boot.binfmt.emulatedSystems on NixOS.).

Here is an example for macOS (arm) that will run an aarch64-linux vm:

$ nixos-shell --guest-system aarch64-linux examples/vm.nix

More configuration

Have a look at the virtualisation options NixOS provides.