pkgs.portableService

pkgs.portableService is a function to create portable service images, as read-only, immutable, squashfs archives.

systemd supports a concept of Portable Services. Portable Services are a delivery method for system services that uses two specific features of container management:

• Applications are bundled. I.e. multiple services, their binaries and all their dependencies are packaged in an image, and are run directly from it.
• Stricter default security policies, i.e. sandboxing of applications.

This allows using Nix to build images which can be run on many recent Linux distributions.

The primary tool for interacting with Portable Services is portablectl, and they are managed by the systemd-portabled system service.

A very simple example of using portableService is described below:

pkgs.portableService {
  pname = "demo";
  version = "1.0";
  units = [ demo-service demo-socket ];
}

The above example will build an squashfs archive image in result/$pname_$version.raw. The image will contain the file system structure as required by the portable service specification, and a subset of the Nix store with all the dependencies of the two derivations in the units list. units must be a list of derivations, and their names must be prefixed with the service name ("demo" in this case). Otherwise systemd-portabled will ignore them.

Some other options available are:

• description, homepage

  Are added to the /etc/os-release in the image and are shown by the portable services tooling. Default to empty values, not added to os-release.

• symlinks

  A list of attribute sets {object, symlink}. Symlinks will be created in the root filesystem of the image to objects in the Nix store. Defaults to an empty list.

• contents

  A list of additional derivations to be included in the image Nix store, as-is. Defaults to an empty list.

• squashfsTools

  Defaults to pkgs.squashfsTools, allows you to override the package that provides mksquashfs.

• squash-compression, squash-block-size

  Options to mksquashfs. Default to "xz -Xdict-size 100%" and "1M" respectively.

A typical usage of symlinks would be:

  symlinks = [
    { object = "${pkgs.cacert}/etc/ssl"; symlink = "/etc/ssl"; }
    { object = "${pkgs.bash}/bin/bash"; symlink = "/bin/sh"; }
    { object = "${pkgs.php}/bin/php"; symlink = "/usr/bin/php"; }
  ];

to create these symlinks for legacy applications that assume them existing globally.

Once the image is created, and deployed on a host in /var/lib/portables/, you can attach the image and run the service. As root run:

portablectl attach demo_1.0.raw
systemctl enable --now demo.socket
systemctl enable --now demo.service