The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical component of the modern Internet, allowing domain names to be mapped to IP addresses, mailservers, and more1. This allows users to access services independent of their location in the Internet using human-readable names. We can host a DNS server ourselves to have authoritative control over our domain, protect the privacy of those using our server, increase reliability by not relying on a third party DNS provider, and allow greater customization of the records served (or the behaviour of the server itself). However, it can be quite challenging to deploy one’s own server reliably and reproducibly, as I discovered during my master’s thesis [2]. The Nix deployment system aims to address this. With a NixOS machine, deploying a DNS server is as simple as: