Ephemeral NixOS on Discord

Learn NixOS by doing. A Discord bot that launches ephemeral NixOS sandbox VMs with an LLM agent that teaches you NixOS interactively.

Every command the agent runs streams to your Discord thread in real-time — you watch it work, learn the NixOS way, and experiment freely in a disposable VM.

Documentation

How It Works

/create "Python and PostgreSQL"

⚙️ Rebuilding NixOS:

{ pkgs, ... }: {
  environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.python3 ];
  services.postgresql.enable = true;
}

✅ nixos-rebuild completed successfully

Your sandbox is ready. The agent used NixOS's declarative config instead of apt install — and it'll explain why.

Features

• Live learning — every command streams to Discord as it runs
• NixOS tutor — explains concepts, prefers declarative config, teaches by showing
• Break things safely — VMs are ephemeral, destructive commands welcome
• Nix language — interactive learning with nix eval and nix repl
• 3 LLM backends — Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama (local)
• Natural language config — describe what you want, LLM generates NixOS modules
• Secure — QEMU hardware isolation, SLIRP networking, rate limiting
• NixOS module — deploy with services.nixos-sandbox.enable = true

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/jhhuh/ephemeral-nixos-on-discord.git
cd ephemeral-nixos-on-discord

export DISCORD_TOKEN="your-bot-token"
export LLM_API_KEY="your-api-key"
nix develop -c cargo run

Commands

Command	Description
/create [description]	Create a sandbox VM, open a thread
/destroy	Destroy the sandbox in current thread
/status	Show VM uptime and idle time
/download <path>	Download a file from the sandbox

Architecture

Discord thread  →  Poise bot  →  LLM agent loop  →  QGA client  →  QEMU VM (microvm.nix)
                                     ↓
                              streams every command
                              and output to Discord

License

MIT