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Building Images with nixos-rebuild build-image
Nixpkgs contains a variety of modules to build custom images for different virtualization platforms and cloud providers, such as e.g. amazon-image.nix and proxmox-lxc.nix.
While those can be imported individually, system.build.images provides an attribute set mapping variant names to image derivations. Available variants are defined - end extendable - in image.modules, an attribute set mapping variant names to a list of NixOS modules.
All of those images can be built via both, their system.build.image attribute, and the CLI nixos-rebuild build-image. To build i.e. an Amazon image from your existing NixOS configuration:
$ nixos-rebuild build-image --image-variant amazon
$ ls result
nixos-image-amazon-25.05pre-git-x86_64-linux.vhd nix-support
To get a list of all variants available, run nixos-rebuild build-image without arguments.
Customize specific image variants
The image.modules option can be used to set specific options per image variant, in a similar fashion as specialisations for generic nixos configurations.
E.g. images for the cloud provider Linode use grub2 as a bootloader by default. If you are using systemd-boot on other platforms and want to disable it for Linode onlz, you could use the following options:
image.modules.linode = {
boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = lib.mkForce false;
};