Nimbus is a local-first AI agent framework designed to empower developers with tools for building intelligent automation solutions. It provides a headless gateway and a command-line interface (CLI), enabling seamless integration of AI-driven tasks into existing workflows.
Key Features:
Headless Gateway: Facilitates communication between AI agents and external systems without requiring a graphical user interface.
Command-Line Interface (CLI): Offers developers a flexible toolset for scripting and automating tasks directly from the command line.
AI Model Support: Enables integration with various AI models, allowing users to leverage advanced capabilities for automation.
Local Execution: Ensures that AI agents run efficiently on local machines, reducing reliance on cloud resources.
Extensibility: Supports customization and extension to meet specific project requirements.
Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for developers, DevOps engineers, and organizations seeking to integrate AI-driven automation into their workflows. By providing a flexible framework, Nimbus enables users to create tailored solutions that enhance efficiency, reduce manual intervention, and streamline operations.
Nimbus can be installed via winget, making it easy to incorporate into your development environment.
README
Nimbus
Cross-service incident context in under 100 ms. Consent-gated automation. Your credentials never leave the machine.
A local-first, HITL-gated AI agent over your dev tools — it builds a private index of your work across 80+ services and answers questions and runs multi-step workflows entirely on your machine.
> [!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.
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 in both directions. As an it drives every connector as an MCP server (tools), and hosts any third-party server you register with . As an , exposes your local index to editor AIs through six read-only tools. The engine never calls a cloud API directly.
# 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
Windows (PowerShell, no admin)
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
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
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 auth , 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).
🛠️ 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.
