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comment: false title: wire Tutorial Overview description: In this tutorial we will create and deploy a wire Hive.#

wire Tutorial Overview#

wire is a tool to deploy NixOS systems. Its usage is inspired by colmena. In many places it's configuration attempts to remain a superset1 of colmena, however it is not a fork.

In this tutorial we will create and deploy a wire Hive. Along the way we will encounter npins, simple NixOS configurations, virtual machines, and deployment keys.

You'll need at least 10~ GB of free disk space to complete this tutorial.

Ready? Skip to Nix Setup.

What features does wire have?#

Features wire Colmena
Node Tagging ✅ ✅
Secret Management ✅ ✅
Parallel Deployment ✅ ✅
Remote Builds ✅ ✅
Key Services ✅ ✅
Pipeline Support ✅ ❌2
Non-Root Deployments ✅ ❌3
--path accepts flakerefs ✅ ❌
REPL & Eval expressions ❌ ✅
Adhoc remote command execution4 ❌ ✅

  1. A lot of your colmena module options will continue to work with wire, but wire has additional ergonomic changes you can take advantage of. ↩︎

  2. You need to write custom nix code to use Colmena hive metadata inside environments like CI pipelines, bash scripting, etc., which requires a knowledge of its internals. Recently it agained the eval feature which has improved the situation since wire was first started. ↩︎

  3. See https://github.com/zhaofengli/colmena/issues/120 ↩︎

  4. wire lacks an equivalent to colmena exec. ↩︎