Leverage and extend your investment in NATS infrastructure to deploy functions and services, turning NATS into the ultimate platform for building distributed applications.

The easiest way to get started with Nex is to check out our Using Nex section in the NATS documentation.

If you're already familiar with Nex and how it works, then you can get going quickly by installing the Nex CLI:

go install github.com/synadia-io/nex/nex@latest

Note that an installation method that doesn't require Go is coming soon.

If you haven't already, please make sure that /usr/local/bin is in your path.

The nex node preflight command is here to help you bootstrap your system and ensure that you have all of the elements you need to start and operate Nex nodes.

The pre-flight check requires a configuration file so it can perform the appropriate checks. If you don't already have a configuration file, then Nex's preflight command will generate a new one for you in ./config.json, as shown below:

{
    "default_resource_dir":"/tmp/wd",
    "machine_pool_size": 1,
    "cni": {
        "network_name": "fcnet",
        "interface_name": "veth0"
    },
    "machine_template": {
        "vcpu_count": 1,
        "memsize_mib": 256
    },
    "tags": {
        "simple": "true"
    }
}

Run the following command to get everything set up using the above defaults:

$ nex node preflight

Nex is made up of the following components

• agent - Agent that runs inside a Firecracker VM, responsible for running untrusted workloads. Not something end users need to interact with.
• fc-image - Tools for building the rootfs (ext4) file system for use in firecracker VMs
• node - Service running on a NEX node. Exposes a control API, starts/stops firecracker processes, communicates with the agent inside each process.
• nex - CLI for communicating with NEX nodes
• ui - User interface for viewing the status of NEX nodes in a web browser

For information on how to contribute to Nex, please read our contributing guide.