Daily Shaarli
September 7, 2026
Welcome to the NixOS Router documentation. This guide will help you install, configure, and maintain your NixOS-based router.
Quick Links
- Installation Guide - Get started with installing the router
- Upgrading Guide - Learn how to upgrade your router
- Verification - Verify your router is working correctly
- WebUI Documentation - Learn about the web interface features
- Configuration - Configure all aspects of your router
This collection of nix modules provides a firewall for NixOS machines. This firewall utilizes nftables and uses network zones.
- Quickstart guide — nixos-nftables-firewall documentation
- GitHub - thelegy/nixos-nftables-firewall: A zone based firewall built ontop of nftables for nixos · GitHub
My home internet connection comes with proper dual-stack support. I get a public IPv4 address via DHCP, a /128 (IA_NA) and a /48 IPv6 prefix (IA_PD) via DHCPv6.
Traditionally you would configure your networking via iproute2 and then fork-off a DHCP client to configure the external addresses.
Usually all of that is being hidden from you through wrappers (like Debian’s ifupdown). The configuration would be set, the daemons fired off and hopefully everything would go well.
The limitations of the system become visible once you have a more dynamic set of interfaces that have to be initialized in some order, some VPN device that depend on the uplink connection etc. While systems like ifupdown have employed hooks of all sorts that you still end up writing a bunch of (inlined) shell scripts that deal with some little details of your setup. Adding sleep statements at worst. Things get tricky when one interface going up changes things on another interface or even system wide (think sysctl, iptables, starting a VPN daemon, …).
I decided to switch to NixOS on my router as part of my crusade to switch most of my devices to it. So, here is how I did it! This post is more or less a raw thought stream from during the setup process. It also resembles a tutorial - that is purely because it makes it easier for me to write, this isn't really intended as a tutorial, more as an explanation of what I did - you're free to use this as reference though!
This is the second part of my journey of having NixOS based router on BananaPI R3 board (bpir3) in which I will focus more on the software side of things. The first part is here, however reading it is not essential for understanding of this part.
Before we begin I want to briefly mention that there are two different ways to have a reproducible router. The obvious one that I took is to just install NixOS there and configure it to serve as a router. The other one is to use OpenWRT, write your configuration in a declarative way and render set of uci commands to apply on an OpenWRT instance. You can read more about the second approach here: https://github.com/Mic92/dotfiles/tree/main/openwrt