Passwordless sudo with remote `nixos-rebuild` and SSH keys

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:58:23 -0400

In my homelab I now have a few machines that run NixOS. This came to be because I wanted the ability to quickly rebuild machines from scratch without having to fiddle with individual settings. Thanks to NixOS I now have a repository that holds a flake that can build bootable images and perform remote nixos-rebuild switch.

Having the ability to remotely perform nixos-rebuild switch is great. All changes are tracked in git, I can standardize certain aspects via Nix modules and it covers all aspects of a system, something I never really got to work reliably in Ansible. Remote nixos-rebuild switch works by specifying --target-host user@host which will use ssh to perform switch on the other machine. If pubkeys are set up authentication will be automatic. However, if the remote user is not root, and it shouldn’t be, sudo is required via --sudo and that will require password and with -S nixos-rebuild will ask you for the password. Not ideal.

Building NixOS images for aarch64 from a x86 Build Platform

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:28:39 -0500

In my homelab I run many different single board computers, among them Odroid M1s. However, there’s various versions of Raspbian, Armbian, and Debian, each of them using some custom tweaks. And that’s a lot of time to maintain them. So I really like the idea of NixOS and read that it can be used to build bootable images for computers. I haven’t fully built intuition for all parts in this so it took me a while to get this working. Here’s my notes.

Nixos on ilikeorangutans

Passwordless sudo with remote `nixos-rebuild` and SSH keys

Building NixOS images for aarch64 from a x86 Build Platform