In this blog post, I want to share another quick update regarding Nirvati’s development.

I want to highlight three features Nirvati significantly improves over the version in Citadel.

HTTPS

In Nirvati, the HTTPS feature is getting significant improvements.

In addition to runningcitadel.com, we plan on making a shorter domain availabel for Nirvati (Probably nirvati.me) and Citadel users. This makes the domains a lot shorter and hopefully easier to remember.

I’ve also decided to implement another feature I didn’t consider before starting Nirvati that I noticed during building this website (Which is currently running on a Citadel node): Multiple domains for HTTPS.

With Nirvati, you’ll be able to assign multiple domains to an app. This can be helpful for apps like WordPress, which has a multi-site mode that could be used with this feature.

For example, this would allow us to run nirvati.org and nirvati.de (A german version of this site that hasn’t been built yet) from the same Nirvati server and get automated HTTPS certificates.

Log viewer

Nirvati is also getting a new log viewer to show logs from apps and Nirvati itself in real time on the dashboard.

With this feature, you’ll be able to see what’s going on if apps have issues, and access certain features for some apps (Like LNBits’ new admin UI) more easily. This is especially useful for advanced users who want easy access to their app logs, and for the LNBits feature mentioned above.

App settings

This feature may not fully be implemented in the first technical preview, but I want to highlight it anyway, because it has been a major design goal for Nirvati.

Apps will have their own settings before installation on the dashboard. This feature will allow you to control much more about apps than you could before. For example, it will allow you to configure what bitcoin network (Mainnet/Testnet/Signet/Regtest) you want to run Bitcoin Core on, the default username for nextcloud, if you want to protect BTC RPC Explorer with a password and whether to run it in its “slow device mode”, …

Nirvati’s new design makes this feature possible and gives you much more control over your server.

Roadmap

I was recently asked about my roadmap for Nirvati, so here is a quick overview of my plans for the coming months.

In May, I want to release the first technical preview of Nirvati for people wanting to set up a new server. This will probably only contain very few apps, it will be a preview of the base system with some features missing.

The focus for June will be porting all current apps available on Citadel to Nirvati, as well as some apps from Umbrel.

In July, all users from Citadel 0.2.x will be able to migrate to the Nirvati-based Citadel 0.3.x. This will already start in beta earlier in June. The beta will be available to anyone with only compatible apps installed. The July version will support all Citadel apps, so there will be no compatibility requirements anymore.

Starting from August, I will focus on a variety of new features. While I can’t share all of them yet, some ideas include

  • A better integration of the apps into the UI (As “widgets” on the dashboard)
  • API tokens for apps on and outside of Nirvati to make permission control easier
  • Full multi-user support
  • UI customizations

I will continue to post regular updates here and appreciate any feedback or feature suggestions.

Thanks to everyone who’s been using and supporting the project so far, I really appreciate the support and you’re helping make this possible!