Portable services

[shivaraj-bh]

Export configuration for backends other than process-compose. For example, systemd (for Linux) and launchd (for macOS) configurations exported under homeModules.

Related:

• Question: How to use systemd.service ? #239
• https://discourse.nixos.org/t/announcing-services-flake/41338/13

[shivaraj-bh]

Notes from Day 1 at Thaigersprint/thaigersprint-2025#1

• services are currently hardwired to be defined inside a process-compose module. It doesn’t make sense anymore if we are to support “Portable Services". Probably perSystem.services.<service-name> (A breaking change but we could do a 1.0 after this providing a migration script)? Edit: nevermind, this only matters if we are to reuse the definitions of process-compose to define configs for other process managers.
• Went through the discussion in Modular services NixOS/nixpkgs#372170, some note-worthy ideas that might be useful here:
  • Instead of each service module defining config.outputs.settings.processes… (process-compose-flake specific), they could configure common settings that will be used by all the process-managers. Similar to the one proposed in the PR above: process.executable = "${lib.getExe config.foo.program}”;.
  • Use _class = "service”; for basic type-checking, but maybe something dynamic like _class = “services-flake-<process-manager>” to prevent merging of, let’s say, process-compose config with systemd one’s.
  • Portable service options (i.e options like enable, port, host…) and process-manager specific options (for ex, process-compose-flake specific options like readiness_probe)