[Nix-dev] Including SSL certificates with NixOS configuration

[Wilhelm Schuster]

Hi,

I’m quite new to Nix/NixOS; coming from Archlinux I like being able to configure my system in a declarative manner. I tried setting up a small web server using nginx and I hit an interesting challenge:

How would be the a good way to include SSL certificates with the NixOS configuration. I’d like to have all my system configuration inside a couple of nix expressions to easily be able to move between different systems. I figured I’d have a separate .nix file which includes all certificates, dhparams, etc. as strings (PEM) which I import into my main configuration.nix. I found builtins.toFile for writing a certificate file from a string, but there doesn’t seem a way to set permissions, which would be important for private certificates (chmod 400).

How would you solve this? Is this even the right approach?

Thanks and cheers, Wilhelm Schuster.