Quick start

One dependency and one Mount(...) call give your Nucleus application a full admin panel at /admin — Data Studio, a live request and SQL feed, sessions, RBAC and metrics. It is served straight from your own binary: nothing separate to deploy, no sidecar process, no database of its own.

You need Go 1.26 or newer and a Nucleus application to mount into.

1. Add the dependency

go get github.com/jcsvwinston/orbit@latest

The current release is v1.9.0; pin that tag rather than @latest for reproducible builds.

2. Mount the module

import (
    "os"

    "github.com/jcsvwinston/nucleus/pkg/nucleus"
    "github.com/jcsvwinston/orbit"
)

func main() {
    app, err := nucleus.New().
        FromConfigFile("nucleus.yml").
        Mount(orbit.Module(orbit.Config{
            Prefix:            "/admin",
            Title:             "Acme Admin",
            BootstrapUsername: "admin",
            BootstrapEmail:    "admin@acme.test",
            // When BootstrapPassword is empty, no admin user is created —
            // provision it another way (e.g. nucleus createuser). The admin
            // users schema is created at mount either way.
            BootstrapPassword: os.Getenv("ADMIN_BOOTSTRAP_PASSWORD"),
        })).
        Build()
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    if err := nucleus.Run(app); err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
}

3. Start the app and sign in

Run the application, open /admin, and sign in as the bootstrap user.

You do not wire up any protection yourself. Orbit registers its prefix with the framework's default-deny RBAC and enforces its own session-based login below that prefix, so the panel is gated from the first request.

4. Register a model so Data Studio has something to show

Orbit brings no data of its own: Data Studio browses the host application's model registry. If your app registers no models — as the bare snippet above does — the panel mounts and logs you in, but Data Studio lists zero models. That is expected, not a broken install.

A model appears in Data Studio the moment your app registers it. In Nucleus that means listing the struct in a module's Models and making sure its table exists:

import (
    "context"

    "github.com/jcsvwinston/nucleus/pkg/model"
    "github.com/jcsvwinston/nucleus/pkg/nucleus"
)

type Note struct {
    model.BaseModel

    Title string `db:"required" json:"title" validate:"required"`
    Body  string `json:"body"`
}

func notesModule() nucleus.ModuleSpec {
    return nucleus.Module[struct{}]{
        Name:   "notes",
        Models: []any{Note{}}, // ← this line puts Note in Data Studio
        OnStart: func(_ context.Context, rt nucleus.Runtime, _ struct{}) error {
            // Dev-mode convenience; production apps use SQL migrations.
            return rt.AutoMigrate(Note{})
        },
    }.Build()
}

Mount it next to Orbit — order does not matter:

nucleus.New().
    FromConfigFile("nucleus.yml").
    Mount(notesModule()).
    Mount(orbit.Module(orbit.Config{ /* ... */ })).
    Build()

Restart, open Data Studio, and Note is there — browse, create, edit, delete. Every model your application registers shows up the same way; Orbit needs no per-model configuration.

Model registration is a Nucleus concept, not an Orbit one — see the Nucleus quickstart and models and database for tags, relations, and real migrations. The runnable examples/minimal in the repository is exactly this page as a program: one Note model, one Mount, a populated Data Studio.

The bootstrap user

Orbit creates the nucleus_admin_users schema every time it mounts. BootstrapPassword only decides whether an admin user is created in it:

• Set — on first start Orbit creates the user named by BootstrapUsername, unless that user already exists.
• Empty — no admin user is created. Provision one another way, for example with the framework's nucleus createuser command against the same database, before you try to sign in. Because the schema already exists after the first start, createuser works right away — no bootstrap password is ever required.

Reading the password from the environment, as the snippet above does, keeps it out of your source tree.

Every option has a default

orbit.Config's zero value is valid. This mounts the panel under /admin with default settings and no bootstrap user:

.Mount(orbit.Module(orbit.Config{}))

Next: Configuration for every option, or How it works for the runtime model.