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Installer ISO

Build a bootable NixOS ISO with the installer preinstalled:

nix build .#iso

Write result/iso/nixos-zfs-installer.iso to a USB stick (for example with dd) or boot it in a VM. The image is the minimal NixOS installation CD with ZFS enabled and nixos-installer on PATH. SSH is enabled and the nixos and root accounts use the password nixos, so you can also run the installer remotely. Once booted:

sudo nixos-installer

The ISO bundles the .#installer-nixos package, a variant of the binary that keeps its Nix store linkage instead of being patched for foreign distributions.

Installer binary

Build the self-contained installer executable with:

nix build .#installer

The flake package (defined in python/installer/package.nix) uses the Python builder in python/installer/build.py, which stages only the installer modules before running PyInstaller. You can also call it directly when pyinstaller and patchelf are on PATH:

python -m python.installer.build --output ./nixos-installer

Copy result/bin/nixos-installer to the installer USB stick and run it as root from the NixOS live environment:

sudo ./nixos-installer

Validate the live environment first with:

./nixos-installer --check

Paste a value into the TUI encryption password field to enable LUKS during install, or set ENCRYPT_KEY:

sudo env ENCRYPT_KEY='change-me' ./nixos-installer

The binary bundles the Python runtime and only the installer modules it imports. It still expects the NixOS installer environment to provide system install tools such as parted, zfs, zpool, cryptsetup, nixos-generate-config, and nixos-install.