nixpkgs/nixos/doc/manual/administration/containers.chapter.md
pennae 1229e735ac nixos-render-docs: add structural includes, use for manual
this adds support for structural includes to nixos-render-docs.
structural includes provide a way to denote the (sub)structure of the
nixos manual in the markdown source files, very similar to how we used
literal docbook blocks before, and are processed by nixos-render-docs
without involvement of xml tooling. this will ultimately allow us to
emit the nixos manual in other formats as well, e.g. html, without going
through docbook at all.

alternatives to this source layout were also considered:

a parallel structure using e.g. toml files that describe the document
tree and links to each part is possible, but much more complicated to
implement than the solution chosen here and makes it harder to follow
which files have what substructure. it also makes it much harder to
include a substructure in the middle of a file.

much the same goes for command-line arguments to the converter, only
that command-lined arguments are even harder to specify correctly and
cannot be reasonably pulled together from many places without involving
another layer of tooling. cli arguments would also mean that the manual
structure would be fixed in default.nix, which is also not ideal.
2023-02-12 13:02:42 +01:00

1.1 KiB

Container Management

NixOS allows you to easily run other NixOS instances as containers. Containers are a light-weight approach to virtualisation that runs software in the container at the same speed as in the host system. NixOS containers share the Nix store of the host, making container creation very efficient.

::: {.warning} Currently, NixOS containers are not perfectly isolated from the host system. This means that a user with root access to the container can do things that affect the host. So you should not give container root access to untrusted users. :::

NixOS containers can be created in two ways: imperatively, using the command nixos-container, and declaratively, by specifying them in your configuration.nix. The declarative approach implies that containers get upgraded along with your host system when you run nixos-rebuild, which is often not what you want. By contrast, in the imperative approach, containers are configured and updated independently from the host system.

imperative-containers.section.md
declarative-containers.section.md
container-networking.section.md