administrating a Linux server is worse than CSS and JS combined

related, but I’ve been having DNS issues with duckdns and others have been reporting the same, so you can now also access #GAGSProject through https://gags-search.xyz/

so if you’re having problems with https://gags-search.duckdns.org/ , try using the new URL instead. it should be faster and better

I want to get isekai’d to a world where all the boring shitty parts of computer-touching are really easy but all the fun parts are just as hard. and configuring NGINX looks like:

proxy_to: 127.0.0.1:8080;
also_use_ssl_please;
thank_you_bye;

@kasdeya so not to tempt you with the promise of greener grass . . . but in nixos-land it kind of is just that simple

@kasdeya (this is not proxying to a localhost port like your example, but that's just because we route things between multiple servers, you can safely ignore that)

@kasdeya I have over a decade of experience with Linux and almost as much experience with networking and hosting, including it being my actual day job for the past 7 years.

I still hate DNS. There's a reason why there are so many memes in the sysadmin community about how the problem is always DNS even when you think it isn't.

@tempest woah wtf? how does this work? I’m guessing this is an abstraction that Nix puts on top of the NGINX config? this looks so much nicer though @_@

@emberquill I’m so glad it’s not just me. to be honest I genuinely thought that every DNS address was going to work equally well? I had no idea that duckdns could actually be worse than some other DNS address for any reason other than just the aesthetics of the domain name. but ugh, at least now I have what is hopefully a much better DNS setup

@kasdeya yes, so in nixos a lot of software will have its configuration wrapped into a nixos config module, which defines a number of options that you can then set in your system configuration

(as an example, you can see all these options for nginx virtualhosts in the current version of nixos by searching https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=25.05&query=services.nginx.virtualHosts.%3Cname%3E. )

the module in question then takes all of these option values, and uses them to produce the final configuration that gets loaded into the system (through setting other options for other modules)

the root of it is modules that result in final config files being written to disk, and in the bootloader config (which is how it knows which files and services to load during startup) but yeah . . . it's abstractions over abstractions over abstractions, but *usually* it's a nicer abstraction, and at the very least it means the config is all in one place

@tempest ohh interesting okay! also I love how all of these options are documented, and documented really well too. I’ve heard that NixOS has very bad documentation (one of the reasons why I haven’t tried it 😅) but this is actually fantastic

@kasdeya our experience was that stuff like writing your own module / packaging your own software / etc was not particularly well documented when we got started with it, but the actual options available from existing modules are pretty well documented yeah

@tempest ohh interesting okay! that’s honestly a lot better than the alternative (the core language features being well-documented but not the module options) so I’m glad to hear it. it sounds like it might not actually be as hard to get started with as I thought - and I can definitely see the appeal as well