[!NOTE]
Nimbus is a headless Gateway + CLI (plus a VS Code extension and a browser web clipper). It runs on your machine and talks to ~80 cloud services through first-party MCP connectors. Nothing about your data — the index, your credentials, the audit log — leaves your box.

What it does

Three things, in one query:

• Incident response — PagerDuty alert → deploy → commit → author, correlated locally.
• CVE / code exposure — indexed code search across every connected repo, with no fan-out network calls.
• Data lineage — Tableau → Looker → dbt → Airflow → the renamed column.

Three load-bearing words

• local — the SQLite index, the Vault, and the audit log all live on your machine. The cloud is a connector, not the source of truth. Telemetry is opt-in and off by default ([telemetry] enabled = false).
• consent-gated — every destructive or outbound action is intercepted by a human-in-the-loop gate before it runs. It lives in the executor, not the prompt, so it can't be jailbroken away.
• MCP — Nimbus speaks the Model Context Protocol in both directions. As an MCP client it drives every connector as an MCP server (tools), and hosts any third-party server you register with nimbus connector add --mcp. As an MCP server, nimbus mcp-server --stdio exposes your local index to editor AIs through six read-only tools. The engine never calls a cloud API directly.

Quickstart

1. Install (per-user, no admin/sudo required):

# Linux only — credentials live in the OS keystore, and the Gateway will not
# start without it:  sudo apt install libsecret-tools   (Debian/Ubuntu)
#                    sudo dnf install libsecret         (Fedora/RHEL)
# macOS only — the keychain must be UNLOCKED. Nimbus never shows an
# authorization dialog (a background service could not answer one), so on a
# locked keychain it fails immediately and tells you what to run. Over SSH or
# in CI, give it its own keychain:  security create-keychain -p "" nimbus.keychain
#                                   security default-keychain -s nimbus.keychain
#                                   security unlock-keychain  -p "" nimbus.keychain
curl -fsSL https://github.com/nimbus-agent/Nimbus/releases/latest/download/install.sh -o /tmp/nimbus-install.sh
# inspect it first if you like:  less /tmp/nimbus-install.sh
bash /tmp/nimbus-install.sh
nimbus --version

irm https://github.com/nimbus-agent/Nimbus/releases/latest/download/install.ps1 | Invoke-Expression
# open a new PowerShell window:
nimbus --version

Every release artefact is GPG-signed (key 5A20457CCD8B53FFAA945240886ADA6B487CAB6E) with a SHA-256 manifest and build-provenance attestations — see Verify your download. Homebrew and Scoop taps are also available (see the install guide).

2. Index a repo you already have — no account, no token, no API key:

cd ~/code/your-project
nimbus init

nimbus init adds the repo to nimbus.toml with code indexing on, starts the gateway, and indexes it. It appends to your config — it never rewrites it, so your comments and existing settings survive (and it keeps a nimbus.toml.bak).

3. Trace a line's provenance — who wrote it, the PR, the ticket, the incident it responded to, and what breaks downstream:

nimbus why src/auth.ts:42

nimbus init prints a real file:line from your own repo to try first. This works with no credentials and no LLM configured.

Optional: add an LLM

Indexing, nimbus why, and the agent briefs all work with no LLM configured — briefs render deterministically. An LLM buys you two things: nimbus ask (natural-language queries), and prose synthesis that rewrites those briefs into more readable narrative.

It does not have to be a cloud one. Point Nimbus at a local model and nothing — not even prompts — leaves the machine:

# ~/.config/nimbus/nimbus.toml
[llm]
prefer_local = true
local_model  = "llama3.1"     # served by Ollama on http://127.0.0.1:11434

See Local & air-gapped LLM setup.

Optional: connect a cloud service

To correlate across GitHub, Jira, PagerDuty, Slack and ~80 others, add a connector. The fastest path is a token-based one like GitHub:

nimbus connector auth github --token <your_PAT>
nimbus connector sync github
nimbus ask "what PRs did I open in the last 7 days?"

(OAuth services — Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, … — use nimbus connector add <service>, which opens your browser. See Connect a service.)

How it works

80+ cloud services ─▶ first-party MCP connectors ─▶ local SQLite index (+ embeddings)
                                                          │
                              your question ─▶ engine ─▶ HITL consent gate ─▶ action
                                                          │
                                       CLI · VS Code · web clipper · (desktop, coming)

A headless Bun Gateway maintains the private index and runs the agent; clients talk to it only over local JSON-RPC IPC. Credentials live in the OS keystore (DPAPI / Keychain / libsecret) — never in logs, config, or IPC. Full design: Architecture.

Connectors

80+ first-party MCP connectors across Google, Microsoft, GitHub/GitLab, Slack, Jira, Notion, plus observability, CI/CD, security/quality, feature-flags, GitOps, data/BI, deploy, finance, and support tools. Browse the full roster in the connector docs; building your own is covered in CONTRIBUTING.

Security & trust

• Human-in-the-loop consent on every outbound/destructive action (structural, not a prompt).
• No plaintext credentials — OS Vault only.
• Signed, reproducible releases — GPG manifests, SBOM (CycloneDX), build-provenance attestations.
• Audited — see the security model & disclosure policy.

Found a vulnerability? See SECURITY.md.

Community & contributing

• 💬 GitHub Discussions — questions, ideas, show-and-tell.
• 🧩 awesome-nimbus — connectors, recipes, extensions.
• 🛠️ CONTRIBUTING.md — good-first-issues, workflow, and the contributor walkthrough. PRs welcome.

License

Dual-licensed by design: AGPL-3.0 for the gateway, CLI, and MCP connectors; MIT for the separately-published @nimbus-dev/sdk and @nimbus-dev/client npm packages so extensions and integrations stay unencumbered.