Orbit
The pluggable admin product for the Nucleus framework.
Orbit is a self-contained admin panel — Data Studio, a live request and SQL feed, a session viewer, RBAC management and system metrics — that mounts in-process into any Nucleus application through the framework's extension/module API.
Data Studio in the showcase application, light theme. The panel also ships a dark theme.
You add one dependency and one Mount(...) call. Orbit then reads everything
it needs from the running application's Runtime and serves its embedded
React interface. There is no separate asset deployment, no out-of-process
sidecar and no database of its own.
Orbit is a separate Go module with its own release cadence. The admin panel was moved out of the framework core so the core stays lean and the panel can evolve as its own product.
What you get
| Module | What it does |
|---|---|
| Data Studio | Browse, create, edit, and delete records for every model in the app's registry — tenant-aware, with import/export. |
| Live runtime inspector | Real-time feed of incoming HTTP requests and executed SQL across the whole app, with optional cross-node aggregation. |
| Session viewer | List and revoke active server-side sessions. |
| Access control (RBAC) | Inspect and manage the Casbin policies and roles backing the app's authorizer. |
| System metrics | Runtime and resource consumption — CPU, memory, goroutines, database pool. |
| Audit log | An in-memory ring of admin actions. |
| Overview & Health | Dashboard and health at a glance. |
The interface ships embedded in the binary (go:embed) and version-pinned
to the Orbit module. Mount Orbit and you get the whole admin panel offline, in
a single binary.
How much of Orbit do you need?
Most applications need only the first row. The other two are additive, and you can adopt them later without changing how the panel is mounted.
| Shape | What it adds | What you run |
|---|---|---|
| The in-process panel | The admin panel, showing live state for its own node. | Nothing extra — it is inside your application binary. |
| The live-feed relay | One shared live feed across the nodes of a single application. | A Redis instance. Enabled with the cluster_* keys in Configuration. |
| The fleet plane | A dedicated, always-on observability server that outlives any one application node. | A standalone admin-server binary, plus an agent embedded in each node. See Fleet observability. |
The cluster_* configuration keys switch on the Redis live-feed relay —
still the in-process panel, just sharing one feed between nodes. The
Fleet observability section documents something else entirely: the
standalone agent-and-server plane, which does not use Redis. Neither one
requires the other.
Requirements
- Go 1.26+
- A Nucleus application to mount into.
- (Optional) Redis — only for the live-feed relay described above
(
cluster_*in Configuration).
Status
The current tagged release is v1.9.0. The
public API — the root module and datasource — is stable for the life of v1.x:
it will not change in a breaking way within v1.
Next: Quick start.