Easy on-the-fly VMs.
Generate an image via elusive-generate-base,
start a VM with elusive label,
and you're good to go!
Creates a compressed image with all configs and dev things copied into it
(around 11 GiB).
It is stored in the Nix store and
registered as GC root,
so the newest image will not be cleaned up by
nixos-collect-garbage
runs.
Behind the scenes, it uses NixOS' integration of systemd-repart.
Accepts one argument: the label. While there can ever be only one elusive VM running at one point in time, there can be different instances on disk.
If a label isn't associated with an instance, a new clean one is created. If it is associated with one, its overlay is re-used.
The instances are keyed by the label. Each instance is just an overlay, which only stores the differences to the base image, so there's very little cost associated with just quickly creating a new one when you need to quickly test something in a VM!
Deletes all current instances on disk.
Note that this is not implied by elusive-generate-base:
elusive-generate-base runs through all existing instances
and rebases them onto the new image instead.