Low-footprint NixOS images

Miniguest makes lightweight NixOS guest images for popular virtualisation tools. The guest systems live entirely on the host's Nix store. The host system does not need to be NixOS.

How lightweight?

Lighter than if it were the host system. There is no disk image, no bootloader, no ISO. Just plain immutable files that are friendly to Nix's deduplication mechanisms.

Getting started

You can read the Installation guide, then the Usage guide.

Support Vector

QEMU virtual machines and Linux containers are supported.

For VMs, Libvirt integration is present. For containers, Miniguest can produce templates in LXC format.

Related work

• nixos-container: Miniguest takes inspiration from NixOS's containers, however, containers wraps systemd-nspawn, whereas Miniguest delegates container management to any supported hypervisor.

• nixos-rebuild build-vm: Miniguest borrows the store-sharing mechanism from NixOS's built-in lightweight QEMU VMs when applicable, but it lets a framework take care of the VM configuration and lifecycle.