= Managing VMs with Nix
:page-parent: How-to Guides

// SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2022 Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>
// SPDX-License-Identifier: GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-or-later OR CC-BY-SA-4.0

VMs in a Spectrum system can optionally be managed with
https://nixos.org/[Nix], a functional package manager.

To create a VM with Nix:

. Define your VM in vm-config/vms.nix on the
xref:user-partition.adoc[user data partition].
+
TIP: Supported settings for VM configuration are documented in
xref:creating-vms.adoc[Creating VMs].  A Nix helper function called
https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/tree/vm-lib/make-vm.nix[`makeVm`]
is provided for creating VM configuration directories with Nix.
. Start the appvm-nix VM (provided by default), and run `vm-rebuild
switch` in its console.
. Reboot the Spectrum host system.  (In future, this step will not be
required.)