Build your first composition

You can build the composition with the nxc build command

It takes as argument a target platform, that we call flavour.

nxc build -f <FLAVOUR>

There are different flavours that NixOS Compose can build:

• docker: Generates a docker compose configuration

• vm-ramdisk: Generates Qemu Virtual Machines

• g5k-ramdisk: Generates Kernel images and initrd deployed with kexec

• g5k-nfs-store: Generates Kernel images and initrd without a packed /nix/store, but mounts the store of the frontend. Also deployed with kexec

• g5k-image: Generates full system image

In this tutorial we will focus only on g5k-ramdisk, g5k-nfs-store, and g5k-image if you have time.

For example, let us build the composition with the g5k-nfs-store flavour:

nxc build -f g5k-nfs-store