Implement dual improvements to enable efficient testing of pipeline changes
without polluting master branch:
1. Add --force flag to create-host script
- Skip hostname/IP uniqueness validation
- Overwrite existing host configurations
- Update entries in flake.nix and terraform/vms.tf (no duplicates)
- Useful for iterating on configurations during testing
2. Add branch support to bootstrap mechanism
- Bootstrap service reads NIXOS_FLAKE_BRANCH environment variable
- Defaults to master if not set
- Uses branch in git URL via ?ref= parameter
- Service loads environment from /etc/environment
3. Add cloud-init disk support for branch configuration
- VMs can specify flake_branch field in terraform/vms.tf
- Automatically generates cloud-init snippet setting NIXOS_FLAKE_BRANCH
- Uploads snippet to Proxmox via SSH
- Production VMs omit flake_branch and use master
4. Update documentation
- Document --force flag usage in create-host README
- Add branch testing examples in terraform README
- Update TODO.md with testing workflow
- Add .generated/ to gitignore
Testing workflow: Create feature branch, set flake_branch in VM definition,
deploy with terraform, iterate with --force flag, clean up before merging.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
