Today, I am excited to showcase a new project: Nirvati.

The main goal of Nirvati is to fix mistakes I made in Citadel, and to bring the abilities of Citadel to a larger group of users.

What is Nirvati?

Nirvati is the core of what will make Citadel 0.3.0 possible. It offers a modular base system projects like Citadel can build on. It currently handles these features:

  • User management (Nirvati is built to support multiple users)
  • App management
  • Container management
  • HTTPS for apps

With Nirvati, we have a much more lightweight core project.

In the future, some large features like Kubernetes support or HTTPS support just need to be added in Nirvati, and Citadel can easily add them with one click.

Why did you start Nirvati?

Nirvati allows decoupling various core parts of Citadel. A majority of features are a lot simpler to implement with this new architecture, including

  • Updates (With the modular architecture, updates will be much faster)
  • The new UI
  • HTTPS
  • Tor & I2P
  • More settings for apps
  • Switching between mainnet/testnet/regtest for Bitcoin Core

In addition, Nirvati can be extended to target more people than Bitcoiners. For example, schools can use Nirvati to manage their IT infrastructure.

Built with Nirvati

There are two projects I’m currently mostly focusing on that are based on Nirvati.

Hopefully, the community will find Nirvati useful and also start projects based on Nirvati or contribute to one of these.

Citadel 0.3.0

Citadel 0.3.0 will be powered by Nirvati. It will be a 100% FOSS personal Bitcoin node, and extend Nirvati for Bitcoiners.

We’l launch this update soon. An app to get your node ready for beta-testing will also be provided through the Citadel app store soon.

waldservr.

Logo coming soon

Waldservr is a new server system optimized for schools. I convinced my school’s IT team to use it, and I hope it’ll be helpful to other schools (especially in Germany) too.

Waldservr is a great example of Nirvati’s capabilities: Like Citadel, it builds on Nirvati, but instead of focusing on Bitcoin apps, it instead contains:

  • A built-in LDAP server
  • Printer cost management
  • Easy integration with MNS+
  • Nextcloud
  • MDM (at least for Android)
  • Many more tools for schools

Nirvati services

Nirvati will also offer a few completely free services that are 100% funded by donations from our users.
This will mostly focus on node remote access and security, and will be very similar to what Citadel currently offers with runningcitadel.com and sats4.me.

Funding

Most work on Nirvati is still funded by the community.

You can support us on OpenCollective.

There also have been some corporate sponsors for Nirvati:

I especially want to thank DTV Electronics as our first sponsor for supporting the development of Nirvati, and Nabi Technologies, who will also soon support Citadel.

Looking for designers

I have zero design experience. To ensure the Nirvati experience stays consistent and the software is easy to use, we’re looking for people who can help design the software.

(Also, we’re looking for a better logo)

If you think you can help, please message me!

For cost reasons, I’d like to use Penpot, a FOSS tool similar to Figma.

Code hosting

Unlike Citadel 0.2.0, Nirvati is now hosted on GitLab. We chose GitLab because it is also FOSS, and we can easily self-host it in the future.

I hope you’ll enjoy Nirvati! I wanted to launch a first beta/technical preview version today, but have had to delay the launch. Another announcement regarding the beta launch will be shared soon.