The project is in the polish development stage. It is actively being used in the authors' configurations and is production-ready.

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nix-secrets is a NixOS secret management solution designed to be lightweight and simple to use. It comes as a NixOS module which automatically installs the nix-secrets binary used for secret management. The secrets themselves are encrypted using the age encryption format.

Advantages

The main advantages over existing solutions like sops-nix and agenix are:

• Entirely managed in the nix module system. No need for .sops.yaml or standalone secrets.nix.
• Supports templates, placeholders and generators.
• Aims to be as atomic as possible with no intermediate state. No imperative bash scripts.
• Utilizes built-in age asymmetrical encryption, resulting in no public key leakage in encrypted files unlike sops-nix or agenix. This means you can have your secrets managed in a private repository without ever showing your public keys.
• Small binary and closure size. The nix-secrets binary is less than 2 Mb, compared to sops being over 50 Mb, for example.

Quick Installation

Add the input to your flake.nix:

inputs.nix-secrets.url = "github:unnamed-systems/nix-secrets";

Then add the module to your system modules:

imports = [ inputs.nix-secrets.nixosModules.default ];

The module automatically adds the nix-secrets binary to your environment.systemPackages.

To generate a key you can use the provided nix-secrets CLI or any other age compatible one (age-keygen, rage-keygen).

nix-secrets keygen [-o <output>]

For further CLI usage consult the documentation or the manpages.

To enable the module itself, create a secrets directory and enable the following options:

{
  security.nix-secrets = {
    storage = ../secrets; # Relative path to your `secrets` (copied to /nix/store)
    identityPaths = [ 
      "/home/user/keys.txt" # Path to your age private key
      "/home/user/.ssh/id_ed25519" # You can also use SSH keys
    ]; 
    recipientAliases = {
      first = "age14e2jdmau7tpau9emcn6gmg26vfl0uyf6cfd9lz85jml6ttv9wq2qphps4t"; # Your age recipient (public key)
      ssh = "ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIEuUsB0HH//1qkvgQMWTEoNd0riZpk+8A5w1Ep2vGKk0"; # Or your SSH public key
    };

    # Add your secrets here...
    secrets = {
      password.recipients = [ "first" ];
      signingKey.recipients = [ "ssh" ];
    };
  };
}

Before actually adding the secret to your storage directory, define it in the config as previously shown. Afterwards, make sure to add your secrets directory to git, rebuild your system and run the command to edit your secret:

nix-secrets edit password --storage secrets

password being your secret name you've defined previously and secrets is the relative directory to your storage. You can set the security.nix-secrets.storagePath to an absolute path (e.g. /home/user/nixos-config/secrets) to eliminate the need to pass the storage argument.

After editing the secret, add the resulting file to git and rebuild your system again. The secret should now be available under its default path in /run/nix-secrets.

For advanced configuration refer to the documentation

Reference

For a full list of options, refer to the nixos option reference and the darwin option reference