When showing Nix or NixOS to newcomers, the first instinct is often to run the NixOS Docker image on Docker or Podman. This week we’re having a look at how to do the same with systemd’s systemd-nspawn facility via the machinectl command. This has huge benefits to both trying out NixOS and also professionally using it like a sidecar VM, as we shall see. If you’re using Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, or similar, jump right in!

In this tutorial-like article, we learned, how to quickly run a nearly full instance of NixOS on any GNU/Linux distribution that uses systemd (e.g. Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, etc…).

This NixOS instance can be configured to our needs and also be run like a sidecar to our normal host system. systemd can treat it like a system service that boots up by default with the host system, using machinectl enable nixos.