this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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How do you document your setup? (piefed.social)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by BruisedMoose@piefed.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Like soup-to-nuts. I know I need to document what I'm doing and I've started several times, but then I never go back and make updates. I don't know if it's just the ADHD or if I'm just going about it or thinking about it in the wrong way.

So I'm curious about:

  • what you use for your documentation
  • how you organize it
  • what information you include
  • how you work documentation into your changes/tinkering flow

Edit: Dang, folks! You all have given me a lot to read through, think about, and explore. Thank you!

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[–] shrek_is_love@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

All my computers (including servers) share the same NixOS Flake. So my documentation consists of:

  1. The Nix code itself
  2. The commit messages for each change I make
  3. Inline comments in the Nix code
  4. A few readme.md files to explain the contents of certain directories
[–] captcha_incorrect@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In only have one server with NixOS. I don’t use flakes, just plain nix files. It still works great as documentation.

The only thing it is missing is why something is setup in a certain way.

[–] shrek_is_love@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Do you use git? That basically forces you to do some documentation as you go. Multi-line commit messages are often helpful too. (When I first learned git, I only committed using git commit -m which is a bit restrictive in terms of how much you can fit in commit messages)

[–] captcha_incorrect@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Where do you push to? I have some secrets in my nix files (passwords). While I will get around to move them away from my nix files soon^TM^, I don't want to push those to a public repo.

[–] shrek_is_love@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I currently push to a private GitHub repository (planning on moving to a self-hosted Forgejo instance soon).

Although making my nix configuration public would be safe anyway since I use sops-nix which encrypts all my passwords in the repo using a key derived from my SSH key. During nixos-rebuild it decrypts them and puts them each in their own text file at /run/secrets, with permissions set so you need sudo to view them. (The permissions can be tweaked as needed)

It was a pain in the neck to get started with initially (like NixOS itself), but it was very much worth it. (Basically a necessity since putting secrets even in a private repo is considered bad practice)

[–] captcha_incorrect@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

I was considering putting the secrets somewhere not in /etc/nixos/ and just point to them. Then I could push my nix files without worry. My plan was to use my other server as a remote with just git and ssh, but that server is not responding and is ~6 by car away from me (I don't own a car). It will be traveling here soon so I can configure it and send it back though.

Thanks for the link to sops-nix, I will check it out. As you said, NixOS is great when you have it running. I can't see myself going back to debian now.