Installing Nix

To use vpsAdminOS, you need to install Nix. Nix is a functional package manager around which vpsAdminOS is built. Please follow the installation instructions.

Our kernel live-patch facility also requires ccache to build the OS.

Downloading vpsAdminOS

Clone the git repository of vpsAdminOS:

git clone https://github.com/vpsfreecz/vpsadminos/
cd vpsadminos

vpsAdminOS is developed on top of the latest NixOS release, so make sure that the correct version of nixpkgs is in NIX_PATH, or set it as follows:

git clone https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs --branch nixos-24.05
export NIX_PATH=`pwd`

Building the OS

The easiest way to try vpsAdminOS is to run it in virtual machine using QEMU:

make qemu

For the first time, the build can take a long time, because it has to compile the kernel and ZFS.

Setup

When the build finishes, a virtual machine is started, its console is in your terminal. By default, the OS creates a file on disk which is used as disk device for zpool called tank within the virtual machine. The zpool is used to store configuration and containers.

On the first boot, the pool will be automatically created and installed into osctld.

osctld will create several ZFS datasets and will generally assume that no one else is using the zpool. For more complicated use-cases, it is possible to scope osctld to a subdataset, see man osctl.

When you have at least one zpool imported and installed, you can proceed to container management.