Purely Functional System Configuration Management

System configuration management is difficult because systems evolve in an undisciplined way: packages are upgraded, configuration files are edited, and so on. The management of existing operating systems is strongly imperative in nature, since software packages and configuration data (e.g., /bin and /etc in Unix) can be seen as imperative data structures: they are updated in-place by system administration actions. In this paper we present an alternative approach to system configuration management: a purely functional method, analogous to languages like Haskell. In this approach, the static parts of a configuration — software packages, configuration files, control scripts — are built from pure functions, i.e., the results depend solely on the specified inputs of the function and are immutable. As a result, realising a system configuration becomes deterministic and reproducible. Upgrading to a new configuration is mostly atomic and doesn’t overwrite anything of the old configuration, thus enabling rollbacks. We have implemented the purely functional model in a small but realistic Linuxbased operating system distribution called NixOS.