What is Wire?
Wire is a tool to deploy NixOS systems. Its configuration is a superset[1] of colmena, however it is not a fork.
WARNING
Wire is alpha software, please use at your own risk. Many features listed in this documentation may not be complete / implemented.
Ready? Skip to the Quickstart.
Why Wire?
INFO
The following is the goal for a stable release and not fully implemented.
| Features | Wire | Colmena |
|---|---|---|
| Secret Management | ✅ | ✅ |
| Parallel Evaluation | ✅ | Experimental |
| Node Tagging | ✅ | ✅ |
jq pipeline support | ✅ | ❌[2] |
| Magic Rollback | ✅ (Planned) | ❌ |
Any colmena configuration will continue to work with wire, but wire has additional ergonomic changes you can take advantage of. ↩︎
You need to write custom nix code to use Colmena hive metadata inside environments like CI pipelines, bash scripting, etc., which requires a knowledge of its internals. ↩︎