Flake-Parts on Simon Shine

A dendritic sops-nix flake template

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 02:35:37 +0200

This tutorial sets up a flake using flake-parts, import-tree, devshell and sops-nix.

You can see the template here: https://github.com/sshine/nix-sops-flake-template

Unlike agenix/ragenix, the sops-nix NixOS module does not require importing a Nix file describing recipients, so it composes cleanly inside flake-parts modules without triggering IFDs.

1. A dendritic flake ¶

This flake auto-imports all .nix files in lib/.

You may want for that directory to be named something else, depending on your project.

Dendritic flake partitions

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:39:00 +0200

tl;dr ¶

Some of my sandboxed CLI agents aren’t in nixpkgs, so they ride along as flake inputs.
They’re heavy, and were polluting the flake.lock of every machine that consumes the flake.
flake-parts partitions move those inputs into a nested flake that’s only evaluated when you actually build the thing.
Because my flake is dendritic (import-tree), I tuck that nested flake inside the import tree using import-tree’s ignored-paths convention: _inputs/flake.{nix,lock}.

While researching this I found a good guide, Dr. Steve’s Dendritic Design with the Flake Parts Framework: A guide on how to structure your Nix code with Flake Parts using the Dendritic Pattern. It covers aspects, collectors, factories, but doesn’t mention flake-parts partitions or lazy input loading.

Dendritic Nix With nixos-shell

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:03:12 +0100

tl;dr ¶

I’m refactoring my system flake using The Dendritic Pattern
I’m testing the system flake using nixos-shell
I’ll completely wipe my laptop’s NixOS installation when ready

Motivation (some ranting) ¶

Last week I experimented with nixos-anywhere, deploy-rs and disko on Hetzner which lets me easily deploy NixOS on a Hetzner VM even though NixOS is not one of the dashboard options.