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Shipnix is a web service for deploying and managing your application server on DigitalOcean with Nix and NixOS.
It's a perfect fit for indie makers, startups, freelancers and consultancies.
For those who try to follow LEAN startup principles, it deploys your application right away, removing friction in your early phases.
Shipnix also provides powerful "one-click" starter projects with functional programming as a first-class citizen. This saves considerable amounts of time when bootstrapping.
As soon as you register, you have a 7 day open purchase. During this period, you can refund your purchase yourself if you are not satisfied. You can manage this refund yourself in the Billing and subscriptions section.
After that, you are consider to have been given a proper chance to evaluate the product.
Please read our our terms for more detailed information.
Shipnix is specialized towards ease of use. You select a starter, fill out the form, deploy and load the code into your git provider.
From there, you have a starting point with a reproducible development environment, all the configuration code and a simple deployment built-in.
That being said, if you are already happy with NixOps, that might just be what you prefer.
Shipnix is not here to challenge the position of existing tools, but to support entreprenurial web developers in having their favorite stack always ready in their toolbelts.
We aim to help web developers, entrepreneurs and freelancers to have a very convenient interface for getting prebuilt starters and just start building their apps instead of spending time on the infrastructure.
If time is of an essence, and you just want to get coding and deploying with a great architecture underneath, you could get considerable value with Shipnix.
Getting NixOS code that just works from the start is also a great way for beginners to familiarize with NixOS without needing to learn everything from scratch.
You may be an entrepreneur wanting to ship fast and often, or a digital agency where not everyone is a devops expert.
You can just code and deploy and charge your clients for developing the app and hosting.
There is no vendor lock-in, which means you can eject your servers from the Shipnix ecosystem and continue deploying your servers in any way you like.
These above reasons are why Shipnix was made.
On the other hand, if you are a NixOS infrastructure specialist, there might be other tools that suits you better.
In any case, you are free to use the open source plan for evaluating how you like it.
Check out the public roadmap.
Some might have concerns about the server being able to pull down source code and build the configuration.
Many prefer binaries being the only thing the servers are able to access, reasoning it with security.
There are many interesting points to unpack out of this question.
This discussion on serverfault.com is a recommended read that provides a lot of good discussion on this topic. The bottom line is that having gcc or ghc installed on the server does not put your server at any significant risk.
NixOS, being focused on pure builds adds extra security enforcing that builds are not accessing the internet, unless specifically built in impure mode. Even the Shipnix starters that requires impure mode, poses little to no added security risk.
The compiled application is more likely to have security risk than the build tools.
If an attacker should gain access to your server shell or database, you have far bigger things to worry about.
Your primary concern as a server manager should be to make sure that there are no unsafe access points to your server. Only allow private key access, and if you can, have your private key live in an encrypted hardware store like a Yubikey.
It's also important to not leak secrets into the Nix store, as it's meant to be "world-readable". All the Shipnix starter are built in a way that takes care of this.
While strong server security protects you from attacks and sensitive data, there are also other concerns this questions poses that can affect your business.
Shipnix is an alternative to wildly complex build systems you probably already know of. Such complex systems add high complexity with little other measurable value. Especially when including NixOS to the consideration.
Highly complex systems that complicates the build process is a great way to create indispensible technicians. This might add a feeling of security, but creates additional risks that affect your business.
How easy is it to replace your current developer if they quit? How easy would it be to sell your business and onboard new developers? Complexity adds cost, and puts your business at risk.
Some valid points can however be that the build tools takes up resources on your server like RAM, CPU and disk space.
An important counter-question is: Is the extra work you spend on making a complex pipeline worth this? Are you making the correct optimization at this time?
Premature optimization is the enemy of getting your software out.
We advice you to monitor resources and check if building your software on your server actually is problematic.
Shipnix aims to aid in fast and secure shipping of your software.
There are several ways to optimize these steps later, when your software needs to scale because your paying users are using up all your resources.
There are several way to share builds from your local machine or a staging server.
NixOS has some great docs about Sharing packages between machines.
If you already have a staging server, it becomes very easy to barely use any resources for your production builds, and you get a CI server included.
Shipnix serves Nix stores via SSH from the staging server to production, freeing build resources up in production and signfificantly reducing build times.
The exact same method is described in detail in our documentation.
If we could offer this in an economically sustainable way, we would.
Free hosting is not a really a business model. It's an expensive marketing technique.
At some point, popular services that offer free hosting must either shut down or start charging you.
A famous example is Heroku, a serverless web hosting service that discontinued their free offering and started charging everyone, affecting millions of users.
If you plan on relying on free managed hosting over years, you are pretty much guaranteed to eventually start paying or go looking for a new service.
If you are fine with this outlook, free managed hosting could be a perfect fit for you.
An alternative to relying on free managed services is to pay for one, or learn to manage a server yourself.
Shipnix is here to make that transition easy, and cheap.
You should probably have the attitude of wanting to learn self-hosting to get the most out of this service
Shipnix has no intention of becoming another Heroku or fly.io.
In the big picture, and over time, self-managing/self-hosting is likely to be the most sustainable and less risky alternative.
Shipnix offers declarative configuration with git rollback, immutability and reproducability on with tools that are often found in managed services.
To keep your app safe, there are some techniques that will help you:
