sorry, yes to build it is fine, but managing them with Nix (e.g. dealing with which ports to expose and etc like in the article) requires NixOS.

edit: I actually never checked, but I guess nothing stops home-manager or nix-darwin from working too, but I don't think either supports running containers by default. EOD all NixOS does is make a systemd service which runs `docker run ..` for you.