GNU Guix allows you to define a complete system (OS + software + configuration + services) as a formula. This means you can roll out a server in a reproducible way from the ground up. Not only that, you can easily keep different generations of server installs around. It is an attractive proposition. The documentation of services can be found here.
By default GNU Guix uses GNU Shepherd instead of Systemd or SysV. In this document we’ll use both Shepherd and SystemD - at least on Debian. You can use one, the other or both (I think). Like SystemD, GNU Shepherd is a daemon. In contrast, GNU Shepherd has the interesting property that it is Scheme Lisp (see also Scheme Lisp everywhere) and does not contain the ‘magic’ of SystemD. I.e., Shepherd has advanced functionality but does not try to guess what you want to do and is therefore predictable (see also the section on design decisions in the Shepherd manual). The Shepherd may be a better proposition for servers over SystemD (or SysV). Production GNU Guix servers typically run GNU Shepherd - it is well tested.
A default service for sshd is defined in /gnu/services/ssh.scm. Don’t be impressed by the code because it handles a lot of options. Main thing to realize is that it is part of GNU Guix itself, part of the main documentation (see openssh-configuration) and that there are no secrets: it is all hackable. Going through that document you may appreciate how configurable a GNU Guix system is!
Back to /gnu/services/ssh.scm: the first part defines data structures (records) and the second part generates the configuration files for different types of ssh servers. Just focus on the Openssh definition which defines a record-type, an sshd user in openssh-accounts, directoris such as /etc/ssh in openssh-activation, and formats /etc/ssh/opensshd.conf in openssh-config-file. Finally it adds a simple Shepherd service in openssh-shepherd-service.
At this point we have studied the part that builds the service configuration. To invoke it use guix system which can provide a working definition in the store and even bootable systems, VMs and Docker containers. In the GNU Guix documentation you can find full definitions of such a bootable system.
For this exercise we simply want to generate an sshd configuration that can be run independently. This may be a good way to start using Guix configurations that (eventually) evolve in a full system definition. GNU Guix does not support this out of the box yet (see also this thread. Even so, there is little magic in reusing the code for these configuration definitions because they are modular. Let’s try and do that!