wire Tutorial Overview

wire is a tool to deploy NixOS systems. Its usage is inspired by colmena. In many places it's configuration attempts to remain a superset^[1] of colmena, however it is not a fork.

WARNING

wire is alpha software, please use at your own risk.

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In this tutorial we will create and deploy a wire Hive. Along the way we will encounter npins, simple NixOS configurations, virtual machines, and deployment keys.

You'll need at least 10~ GB of free disk space to complete this tutorial.

Ready? Skip to Nix Setup.

Why wire?

Features

Features	wire	Colmena
Node Tagging	✅	✅
Secret Management	✅	✅
Parallel Deployment	✅	✅
Remote Builds	✅	✅
Key Services	✅	✅
Pipeline Support	✅	❌[2]
Non-Root Deployments	✅	❌[3]
--path accepts flakerefs	✅	❌
REPL & Eval expressions	❌	✅
Adhoc remote command execution[4]	❌	✅

Speed

wire is about >2x faster than colmena deploying identical large hives.

Command	Mean [s]	Min [s]	Max [s]	Relative
wire@HEAD	185.075	185.075	185.075	1.00
colmena@pinned	343.075	343.075	343.075	1.85

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1. A lot of your colmena module options will continue to work with wire, but wire has additional ergonomic changes you can take advantage of. ↩︎

2. You need to write custom nix code to use Colmena hive metadata inside environments like CI pipelines, bash scripting, etc., which requires a knowledge of its internals. Recently it agained the eval feature which has improved the situation since wire was first started. ↩︎

3. See https://github.com/zhaofengli/colmena/issues/120 ↩︎

4. wire lacks an equivalent to colmena exec. ↩︎