Orbit

The pluggable admin product for the Nucleus framework.

Orbit is a self-contained admin panel — Data Studio, a live request/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. It is a separate Go module with its own release cadence, extracted from the framework core per nucleus ADR-019 so the core stays lean and the admin can evolve as its own product.

You add one dependency and one Mount(...) call; orbit reads everything it needs from the running app's Runtime and serves its embedded React SPA — no separate asset deployment, no out-of-process sidecar, no database of its own.

---

Features

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 (sourced from the framework's observability event bus), 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 UI ships embedded in the binary (go:embed), version-pinned to the orbit module — a consumer who mounts orbit gets the full admin offline, in a single binary.

Install

go get github.com/jcsvwinston/orbit@v0.1.0

The first tagged release is v0.1.0 (@latest resolves to it; pin @v0.1.0 for reproducible builds). Pre-1.0: the API may still change before v1.0.

Requires Go 1.26+ and a Nucleus application to mount into.

Quick start

Mount orbit on the application builder:

import (
    "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",
            // BootstrapPassword empty → a random one is generated and printed
            // to stderr once on first boot. Capture it and rotate.
        })).
        Build()
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    _ = app.Start()
}

Start the app, open /admin, and sign in with the bootstrap user. Orbit self-registers its prefix with the framework's default-deny RBAC and enforces its own session-based auth below that prefix.

The zero value is valid too — orbit.Module(orbit.Config{}) mounts under /admin with sensible defaults.

Configuration

orbit.Config is bound from the modules.orbit.* subtree of your nucleus.yml (or set it directly in Go). All fields are optional.

Key (modules.orbit.*)	Type	Default	Description
prefix	string	/admin	URL path orbit mounts under.
title	string	—	Heading shown in the UI.
environment	string	—	Label shown in the UI (e.g. production).
bootstrap_username	string	—	Admin user created on first boot.
bootstrap_email	string	—	Email for the bootstrap user.
bootstrap_password	string	—	Password for the bootstrap user; empty → a random one is generated and printed once.
auth_database	string	app default	DB alias whose handle backs admin auth + the bootstrap user (use a dedicated DB for the admin user store).
migrations_path	string	migrations	Directory the migrations view reads.
audit_max_size	int	10000	In-memory audit-log ring size.
multitenant_enabled	bool	false	Filter records by the request's resolved tenant.
multitenant_default	string	—	Default tenant when none is resolved.
multitenant_ids	[]string	—	Known tenant IDs for the selector UI.
live_exclude_patterns	[]string	—	Path patterns excluded from the live HTTP feed.
trace_url_template	string	—	External trace-explorer URL template (supports {trace_id}).
cluster_enabled	bool	false	Aggregate the live feed across nodes via a Redis relay.
cluster_redis_url	string	—	Redis URL for the live-telemetry relay.
cluster_channel	string	nucleus:admin:live:v1	Pub/sub channel for the relay.
cluster_node_id	string	runtime id	Explicit node identifier in the relay.
cluster_token	string	—	Shared secret to reject untrusted relay messages.

# nucleus.yml
modules:
  orbit:
    prefix: /admin
    title: Acme Admin
    environment: production
    bootstrap_username: admin
    bootstrap_email: admin@acme.test

How it works

Orbit is a nucleus.ModuleSpec. On startup it captures the app's Runtime and builds its panel from the framework's public accessors — the model registry, all managed database handles, the session manager, the RBAC enforcer, the live event bus, and storage. It never reaches into framework internals:

• In-process — it sees live runtime state (sessions, SQL, model registry, metrics) that an out-of-process sidecar could not, without any IPC surface.
• Self-contained auth — it owns a session-based login (DatabaseAdminAuth) against the nucleus_admin_users table and self-registers its prefix with the framework's default-deny RBAC, so the framework middleware never double-gates it.
• Embedded SPA — the React UI is built into the module and served under the mount prefix.

Cluster observability (optional)

For fleet-wide live telemetry, orbit ships sibling modules that are releasable independently:

Module	Role
orbit/proto	Connect-RPC contract + generated stubs.
orbit/agent	In-process agent (agent.NewExtension) that ships events to an admin server.
orbit/server	Standalone admin-server binary that receives them.

Most applications only need the root orbit module for the in-process panel.

Relationship to Nucleus

Orbit is a "dogfooding" consumer of Nucleus: mounting a real, deep admin exercises and hardens the framework's extension/Runtime surface. The admin used to live in the framework core as pkg/admin; ADR-019 extracted it here as a clean break. Nucleus itself no longer ships any admin code.

Requirements

• Go 1.26+
• A Nucleus application to mount into.
• (Optional) Redis — only for the cross-node live-telemetry relay.

Development

go build ./...        # build the root module
go test ./...         # test it
go work sync          # the repo is a Go workspace: ./ ./proto ./agent ./server