Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI
machine0.ioHi HN! Excited to launch machine0, a CLI that makes it easy to create, provision and snapshot persistent NixOS (& Ubuntu) VMs.
You can think of machine0 as a modern VPS provider. VMs stay on unless switched-off (with 99.99% uptime), they have static IPs and HTTPS endpoints, 1-60 vCPU, up to 240GB RAM and optionally GPUs. The CLI provides commands to manage lifecycle, snapshots and also provision the VMs using Nix flakes or Ansible playbooks. VMs are priced by the minute of usage.
What makes machine0 unique is that it has first class support for NixOS! In a nutshell, NixOS lets you define your entire OS as code (think Terraform but for your Linux). A flake declares your system state (packages, services, firewall rules, users...) and pins all dependencies via a lockfile. Given the same flake.nix and flake.lock, `nixos-rebuild switch` always produces the exact same system.
The NixOS ecosystem is mature, and flakes are expressive: at the system level you can define packages, what's in /etc, firewall rules, users & groups etc. At the user level, you can define your shell, aliases, tmux and vim config. Having your entire environment defined as code makes it easy to audit what's installed and how things are set up. You can rollback by reverting the last commit. And agents can write the code for you and test it against disposable machine0 VMs.
If you'd like to dive right in, these commands will get you started:
npm install -g @machine0/cli
machine0 new my-vm --image nixos-25-11 # create a new nixos VM
machine0 provision my-vm ./flake#my-profile # provision it using a nix flake
machine0 ssh my-vm # ssh in
machine0 stop my-vm # stop the VM
machine0 images new my-vm my-snapshot # create a snapshot
machine0 new my-clone --image my-snapshot # create a new VM from the snapshot
- Documentation: https://docs.machine0.io/introduction/overview
- machine0 NixOS flakes: https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixos
If you're in the habit of using VMs, or want to know what the NixOS fuss is about, would love for you to give machine0 a try! Very cool! I'll definitely check this out for auto-research like experiments, esp. with GPUs I'm happy to see this, and I have lots of thoughts about this. Building declarative services on Nix is a far superior way of distributing Linux to VMs than most any other way I've tried. I am working [1] on very similar things, but I've been leaning more on the self-hosted path, my VM template targets libvirt and Proxmox VE with a single CLI api. I even have an experimental branch that targets DigitalOcean. For VMs especially, I want my OS to be immutable. My VMs should contain no state other than my application state. Upgrades should be a full image replacement and reboot. So in my template, I have created the VMs with two disks: first one is for NixOS and is built from an image, and it is read-only. The second is mounted to /var and is used for all system configuration as well as application state. If I have multiple VMs, they can all share the same base image (thin provisioned). That's the mode that I want for my deployments of services, immutable and as stateless as possible. For agent use, its different, you actually want a mutable NixOS root so that the agent can do what it wants. I built three modes: immutable, semi-mutable, and mutable. mutable removes the read-only lock on the root, and just lets you manage the VM as a pet. semi-mutable adds an ephemeral overlayfs that gets wiped the next time you upgrade the base image. So that gives you kind of the best of both worlds: an immutable read-only base image and the ability to "nix profile add" whatever you (or your agent) wants, but with the contract that these imperatively installed things will disappear the next time you upgrade. Are you planning on adding a LICENSE to your machine0-nixos repo? I tried out NixOS a few years ago but recently transitioned back to Rocky Linux and Ansible. I know that Nix is treasured by some but it always came across as an esoteric tool for functional programming idealists. I found the community to be split between people who were genuinely helpful and people who were just... not. I found Nix just really hard to work with. The documentation was just so poor and every aspect of Nix just seemed to be divorced from pragmatism. An example of this, years ago, was that I wanted to do something VERY simple: codify the creation of a directory in NixOS. It took me 6 HOURS to find the relevant code for doing that. I couldn't even get an answer out of the Discord server. I don't know if I'll ever pick it up again. The learning curve was incredibly steep and it's just not on job descriptions and I've never worked in a shop that has used it. I tried it out as a curiosity, found that it was hair pullingly frustrating to use, and moved on. Yea, I totally get it. The thing is agents change the game. You no longer need to worry about the learning curve or how best to implement. Just point your agent at a machine0 VM and say "make a machine that does X", then you get code you can use to build on any nix box and you'll always get the same result. Once you experience this, it's hard to go back to a "traditional" OS, you'll want to nixify everything :) Always happy to meet others that are working with NixOS :) I've just added the License - it's MIT. Big fan of exe.dev so the added Nix seems like a solid value add. exe.dev is great but lurking in my mind is: "how will I replicate this if I ever need to move to AWS etc.." for all the service composition. Site looks great too Thanks! Yup, one of the benefits of defining your VMs as code using Nix, is that you can take that code to any supplier, and you're guaranteed exactly the same build. Come join us at https://tacosprint.org/
We have more availability!
(Also sponsor maybe ) Would love to join the next one! Very cool. I have something similar set up for my homelab where I launch nixos incus containers. Been great for offloading stuff from the my agents It's funny, because my homelab is exactly where this started :) Looks cool. Can I run on other clouds. Soon! I’ve been using machine0 for hosting openclaw and a couple of web apps i’ve been working on. Great product super easy to use with claude code. Been great having you :) So happy to see this, finally. Thanks! I'm so happy to be building this :) How does machine0 handle NixOS state drift and recovery in practice—for example, if a VM is manually modified outside the flake, can I detect or reset that drift, and how do snapshots interact with flake-based provisioning? It's not possible to modify the VM outside of the flake :) I wonder how easy this would be to port to Guix? You could point your agent at the machine0 CLI and ask it to :) I made this (minus NixOS support, I should add that) for proxmox VE using their API a few weeks ago. I mean it's not this extensive, but it works: I mean, I'm not going to claim it's remotely near the same quality. And proxmox has some holes in their support for cloud init. And of course you need a mini pc on a good internet connection or the like. But extremely fast provisioning of a any of VMs ... very handy. Proxmox has too many compromises though. Maybe I should do the reverse, and extend this until it can fully replace proxmox entirely. I'm also a big fan of proxmox! Would be happy to help you extend machine0 though :) Happy to chat about your requirements over email: barnaby@machine0.io Great product, with great explanation Thank you!