intro - welcome to minibase
minibase is a framework for building dependable static infrastructure.
a new approach to the minibase using flakes and lix for production uses, aiming to cooperate with aux.computer as they get off the ground.
minibase is NOT a linux distribution, we provide an opinionated set of modules that you can plug into your existing and future nixos installations. these are patterns for building secure local network services that you can easily setup to share with your friends and neighbors.
every deployment is different and operating services for others is a big responsibility. please make sure you know what you're doing before you take that step. experimenting with technical friends to learn and make mistakes is a great way to gain the needed experience! just don't expect to get everything right on the first try and only take on responsibilities that you can prove you can handle.
we categorize our operations by order of responsibility and aim to promote
self-determination. stations are permanent public installations that provide
services to their local area, these are managed by volunteers or a community
interest group. ships are independent systems designed to pursue some specific
interest. entities are fully mobile devices or systems operable by some being.
entitites may be registered with either a station or a ship. a ship may
form certain types of peer relationships with a station or any other ship.
before you start deploying, get your local environment running! the best reference is installing lix, but linux and macos users can also just use the following snippet:
curl -sSf -L https://install.lix.systems/lix | sh -s -- install
We don't currently provide any install media, follow the upstream documentation for instructions. come back when you have a working nixos system.
This will change in the future, starting with specialized devices. We aim to converge with aux.computer eventually so there are no plans to independently host a distribution. Minibase deployments have historically been heterogeneous, so we are also interested in efforts like nixbsd, but we'll wait to see how things play out for now.
current works in progress access to the development board is restricted. contact a volunteer for access.
gamer-tier hardware and above is well-supported in the nix community, but many minibase applications are well served by a raspberry pi or another affordable single-board computer. upstream nix has some support and many of the guides are used as a starting point for minibase docs.
all of the devices that we document here are actively used in production using this repo and the methods outlined in the wiki.
not to go into too much detail, but these are some of the components that we're using.
booting(8) containers(8) ejabberd(8) hypergate(8) security(8)