Writing recipes

A recipe is not a flake but a module with its metadata: a folder <author>/<kind>/<name>/ with

• recipe.toml – what the recipe is (author, license, description, tags), what it can be built for (systems) and how a VM from it runs (CPU, memory, disk, network, display, …);
• default.nix – a NixOS module (kind nixos) or a nix-darwin module (kind macos). omaflake adds its guest modules around it – guest hardware, the omaflake agent, the user, SSH keys, locale – so a recipe only says what makes it different;
• optionally <system>.nix – its variant for one architecture, e.g. x86_64-linux.nix.

"$schema" = "https://omaflake.dev/schema/recipe/v1.json"
systems = ["aarch64-linux"]
author = "your-github-name"
license = "MIT"
description = "Rust development: rustup, rust-analyzer and neovim with the Rust LSP."
tags = ["rust", "neovim"]
cpus = 4
memory_gb = 8
disk_gb = 40
network = "shared"
share = true
ephemeral = false

The full format – every field, the module arguments, what a recipe must not do, and how to test it – is in the recipe repository’s CONTRIBUTING.md. The machine-readable form is the recipe schema.

Architectures

systems lists the architectures a recipe is built and tested for, named as Nix names systems:

Kind	Systems
nixos	aarch64-linux (a Mac with Apple silicon), x86_64-linux
macos	aarch64-darwin

A recipe without systems (written before omaflake 0.2.0) is built for Apple silicon. omaflake shows a recipe only where it runs (the app’s filter “Other Architectures” and omaf recipes --all-systems show the others) and builds it only for a system it lists. Images and VMs record their system; a VM of another architecture is not created, started or imported.

Sources

omaflake ships no recipes. It reads them from recipe sources: by default omaflake/recipes; other GitHub repositories (also private ones), any HTTPS folder with a catalog.json, or a local folder, whose recipes are used as they are on disk – the way to develop one:

omaf sources add ~/src/my-recipes --first
omaf build <author>/<kind>/<name>

A source of your own starts as a fork of omaflake/recipes: its FORKING.md explains tools/catalog.py and the catalog.