Self-Hosted Overview

Self-hosting gives you full control over the Nimbus backend — your code never leaves your infrastructure.

When to self-host

Self-host when:

• Your codebase contains sensitive IP and can't leave your environment
• You need to run tasks against private GitHub Enterprise repos
• You want to integrate Nimbus with internal tooling
• You're running on-premise with no internet access (requires local Anthropic API access or a proxy)

Architecture

┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐
│   Frontend   │────│   FastAPI    │────│   ChromaDB   │
│  (Next.js)   │    │  (backend)   │    │  (vectors)   │
└──────────────┘    └──────────────┘    └──────────────┘
                           │
                    ┌──────────────┐
                    │    SQLite    │
                    │  (tasks/db)  │
                    └──────────────┘

Prerequisites

• Docker and Docker Compose, or
• Python 3.12+ and Node 20+ for manual setup
• Anthropic API key
• Voyage AI API key
• GitHub App or personal access token

Setup options

Method	Best for
Docker Compose	Quickest setup, production-ready
Manual backend	Development, customization
Manual frontend	Custom frontend changes

Data storage

Data	Location	Notes
Tasks, repos, keys	backend/nimbus.db	SQLite, auto-created
Vector embeddings	.chroma/	ChromaDB, persists across restarts
Task workspaces	/tmp/nimbus-workspaces/	Ephemeral, cleaned after task
Sessions	~/.nimbus/sessions/	Local CLI only