Prepare public images in the NixOS GCP account

[tewfik-ghariani]

Prepare public images in the NixOS GCP account

[garbas]

What if we setup a GitHub actions workflow to do this (example only when nixpkgs-channels gets updated?

This would allow us to have this images always up to date. And I assume we could do the same for EC2 and Azume images.

What we would have to change is the location of channels -> latest images mapping (gce-images.nix, ec2-amis.nix, azure-images, ...). It never made sense to me that we are keeping this information in nixpkgs anyway. I think having this mappings as part of the artifacts of each evaluation would make much more sense.

[AmineChikhaoui]

@tewfik-ghariani building the image involves a nix-build as well which maybe we can do in hydra like we do for AWS now.

@garbas I think Github actions run in containers ? so a VM build will likely not work I think but if this is prebuilt in hydra like for amazon images then it would be just pull the latest build and create an image out of it. Maybe also we can test the image as part of the Github action by spinning up a vm, making sure it boots correctly then tearing it down.

[AmineChikhaoui]

Oh wait I just saw the example link @garbas , looks like they do a docker build in the action so that probably doesn't run inside a container.

What we would have to change is the location of channels -> latest images mapping (gce-images.nix, ec2-amis.nix, azure-images, ...). It never made sense to me that we are keeping this information in nixpkgs anyway. I think having this mappings as part of the artifacts of each evaluation would make much more sense.

I didn't get this part, what do you mean by keeping the mapping out of nixpkgs, where exactly would that be instead ?

[garbas]

@AmineChikhaoui currently we have in nixpkgs a few attribute sets which map from "nixos version" to "uploaded image" (gce-images.nix, ec2-amis.nix, azure-images.nix, ...). We would have to update this each time we upload new images. I think it would be nicer to have this somewhere else. Having them right next to the evaluation artifacts would be where I would put them (eg. in some json file or something like that).

And how https://channels.nixos.org is setup right now you could easily access latest evaluation and thus latest ids of uploaded images.

We would also need to change how we handle this in https://nixos.org/download.html but this are minor fixes we have to do.

[garbas]

<dreaming>
We could also generate and upload all of other images for other cloud (or non-cloud) services. Taking the work that nixos-generators did and show it on the nixos website.
</dreaming>

[tewfik-ghariani]

Hello, can you please share the exact process to build/spin up GCE Images using the latest nixpkgs version as well as the encountered issues?

Will there be a need to make some changes to the create-gce.sh script in nixpkgs?

[tewfik-ghariani]

Done as part of nix-community/nixops-gce#17 & NixOS/nixpkgs#117021

Thanks @AmineChikhaoui!

Closing,