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machine0

Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI

Details

External ID
48543245
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
machine0
Website domain
machine0.io
Launched
June 15, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
96
Upvotes percentile
0.9146174863387978
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hi HN! Excited to launch machine0, a CLI that makes it easy to create, provision and snapshot persistent NixOS (& Ubuntu) VMs.You can think of machine0 as a modern VPS provider. VMs stay on unless switched-off (with 99.99% uptime), they have static IPs and HTTPS endpoints, 1-60 vCPU, up to 240GB RAM and optionally GPUs. The CLI provides commands to manage lifecycle, snapshots and also provision the VMs using Nix flakes or Ansible playbooks. VMs are priced by the minute of usage.What makes machine0 unique is that it has first class support for NixOS! In a nutshell, NixOS lets you define your entire OS as code (think Terraform but for your Linux). A flake declares your system state (packages, services, firewall rules, users...) and pins all dependencies via a lockfile. Given the same flake.nix and flake.lock, `nixos-rebuild switch` always produces the exact same system.The NixOS ecosystem is mature, and flakes are expressive: at the system level you can define packages, what's in /etc, firewall rules, users & groups etc. At the user level, you can define your shell, aliases, tmux and vim config. Having your entire environment defined as code makes it easy to audit what's installed and how things are set up. You can rollback by reverting the last commit. And agents can write the code for you and test it against disposable machine0 VMs.If you'd like to dive right in, these commands will get you started: npm install -g @machine0/cli machine0 new my-vm --image nixos-25-11 # create a new nixos VM machine0 provision my-vm ./flake#my-profile # provision it using a nix flake machine0 ssh my-vm # ssh in machine0 stop my-vm # stop the VM machine0 images new my-vm my-snapshot # create a snapshot machine0 new my-clone --image my-snapshot # create a new VM from the snapshot - Demo of installation + NixOS provisioning via Claude Code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT8N0_e3Vfg- Documentation: https://docs.machine0.io/introduction/overview- machine0 NixOS flakes: https://github.com/fdmtl/machine0-nixosIf you're in the habit of using VMs, or want to know what the NixOS fuss is about, would love for you to give machine0 a try!

Enrichment

Theme
systems tools and desktop utilities
Vertical
—
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
managed nixos vms from cli
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Running a cloud VM hosting provider with per-minute billing, custom hypervisor orchestration, public networking, and GPU passthrough requires massive capital and specialized cloud infrastructure engineering.

What it would actually take: A functional implementation requires bare-metal server infrastructure across multiple global regions, a low-level hypervisor management layer (such as Firecracker microVMs or QEMU/KVM with PCI passthrough for NVIDIA/AMD GPUs), and software-defined networking for static public IPv4 allocations. It also needs block storage snapshots (e.g., Ceph or ZFS), a multi-tenant orchestration control plane, and a robust metering/billing engine. Building this demands deep Linux kernel/virtualization expertise, datacenter networking competence, and millions in hardware commitments.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Ansible, Atomic distros with rpm-ostree, Guix, Rocky Linux, exe.dev

Concerns raised: Steep learning curve and poor beginner documentation, High cognitive load for teams unfamiliar with Nix, Static IP allocation interaction with per-minute pricing model, Not commonly used in job market or enterprise environments, Nix language harder to read compared to alternatives like Lisp

Feature requests: Easy way to share golden dev environment snapshots with team members, Nixpkg availability for the tool, Improved beginner-friendly documentation and onboarding materials

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 136 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #20 of 137 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 216 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product