SnowPea

A NixOS Flake for Homelab Management

Because managing a homelab with NixOS flakes is easier than remembering which Pi is which.

SnowPea is my comprehensive NixOS Flake configuration for managing an entire homelab infrastructure across ARM-based single-board computers and x86 machines. The project demonstrates declarative infrastructure management at scale with 16 machines running everything from Kubernetes clusters to standalone services.

Infrastructure

The homelab consists of:

• K3s Kubernetes Cluster: 3 Orange Pi 5 Plus controllers and 6 Raspberry Pi 4 workers
• Standalone Services: Various additional Pis and x86 boxes running dedicated services
• Multi-Architecture Support: Seamlessly handles both ARM and x86 hardware

Key Features

• Declarative Configuration: Everything defined in NixOS flakes for reproducibility
• Remote Deployment: Simple deployment via just nix-deploy command
• SD Card Image Generation: Automated creation of bootable images for different SBCs
• Secrets Management: SOPS integration for secure credential handling
• Centralized Management: Single source of truth for all machine configurations

Tech Used

• NixOS 25.05 with Flakes
• K3s for lightweight Kubernetes
• SOPS for secrets management
• Just for task automation
• Orange Pi 5 Plus and Raspberry Pi 4 hardware

Project Goals

SnowPea serves multiple purposes:

• Production homelab infrastructure management
• Learning platform for advanced Nix/NixOS techniques
• Experimentation with infrastructure as code patterns
• Documentation of real-world NixOS deployment practices

Check out the project on GitHub to see the full configuration and learn more about managing a NixOS-based homelab.