microvm-nix/microvm.nix

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

2882 stars · 222 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A Nix Flake for building and running lightweight NixOS MicroVMs on NixOS/Linux and macOS hosts using one of eight hypervisors such as QEMU, Firecracker, and cloud-hypervisor. MicroVMs can be built like Nix packages or installed declaratively as systemd services, with read-only erofs/squashfs root disks, virtiofs/9p shares, and TAP or user networking.

Use cases

• run lightweight NixOS virtual machines declaratively
• isolate services into separate VMs instead of containers
• build microvms as nix packages
• run firecracker or cloud-hypervisor vms from a nix flake
• compartmentalize services on a shared nixos host
• manage declarative vms as systemd services on nixos
• run nixos microvms on macOS

When to choose

• you use NixOS or Nix flakes and want isolated, reproducible VMs with minimal overhead
• you want stronger isolation than nixos-container or Docker with a smaller attack surface
• you want to run many small NixOS systems as systemd services on one host
• you need a choice of hypervisors (QEMU, Firecracker, cloud-hypervisor, crosvm, etc.) per VM

When to avoid

• you don't use Nix or NixOS and aren't willing to learn it
• you need general-purpose VM management for arbitrary OS images rather than NixOS guests
• you need flexible memory allocation, since RAM is fixed per VM (with only balloon-based shrinking)
• you need features unsupported by your chosen hypervisor, such as 9p shares on Firecracker

Facets

framework · maturity active

infrastructure-as-code deployment configuration-management self-hosted self-hosted cloud-computing infrastructure-as-code operating-systems nixos nix-flake microvm firecracker qemu cloud-hypervisor crosvm kvmtool vfkit systemd-services declarative-vms erofs squashfs virtio virtualization devops linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="microvm-nix/microvm.nix")