Your digital life, in one place.
Nucleus is a modular, self-hosted ecosystem for the things you run, store and use every day — files, photos, media, messages, your home. One system, on hardware you control.
Your digital life shouldn’t feel like a collection of unrelated services.
It arrived one account at a time. Nothing is where you left it, and nothing knows about anything else.
- Your files live in a drive you rent by the month.
- Your photos sit in a gallery that decides what counts as a memory.
- Your media is spread across libraries that expire.
- Your messages are in an app that owns the export button.
- Your home answers to somebody else’s cloud.
- Everything else is in a tab you have not closed since March.
None of it is unusable. It is just not yours, not together, and not arranged around you.
A modular, self-hosted personal ecosystem.
Nucleus gives applications and services a common home — shared foundations, one place to open — while the data and the machine underneath stay yours.
One ecosystem
A single home for everything you run, and one way to move between all of it — parts that know about each other instead of six tabs that do not.
Independent applications
Each app is its own project with its own releases. Install one without the others; nothing breaks when something is missing.
Shared infrastructure
The core gives every application the same foundations to build on, so the part that adds identity, storage or notifications adds it for all of them at once.
Hosted by you
It runs on your machine, your server or your homelab — one deployment, your database, your disks.
Extensible on purpose
Plugins add capability to apps and connect them to each other; widgets surface anything worth a glance on the dashboard. The ecosystem is meant to be added to, not just consumed.
Three ideas hold the whole thing up.
Modular. Use only what you need.
Nucleus is a set of parts, not a package deal. Add an application the day it becomes useful, remove it the day it stops. A small setup is a legitimate setup.
Self-hosted. Run it where you want it.
A machine under the desk, a NAS in the cupboard, a rented VPS. Nucleus does not care which — only that the decision about it belongs to you.
Yours. Your data. Your system. Your rules.
Your files stay files. Your database stays yours. The parts that reach the outside world do it because you connected them, not because the product needed them to.
Most software asks you to learn its shape. Nucleus is meant to take yours.
The ecosystem
Core — Runtime & shared foundations. The part that boots, loads whatever you have installed and gives all of it the same components and wiring to build on.
- Hub — The dashboard. The front door of your Nucleus: everything you have installed, your widgets and a dashboard you arrange yourself.
- Orbit — Files & personal cloud. Your storage: upload, organise, preview and share. Object storage underneath, a calm file manager on top.
- Echo — Messaging. Real-time conversations between the profiles on your Nucleus, with the other apps able to share straight into a thread.
- Pulse — Widgets & dashboards. The widget layer. Pin what matters — system load, a playlist, an app’s latest activity — and decide where it floats.
- Watchlist — Films & shows. What you are watching, what you finished and what is waiting. Tracking without an algorithm attached to it.
- Goals — Calendar & tracking. Habits and intentions on a calendar — the quiet kind of tracking that does not turn your week into a leaderboard.
- Prism — Photos. Your photo library, browsing the files you already have. Reads from Orbit or straight off the disk.
- Home — Smart home. Your house, inside Nucleus. Connects to a Home Assistant instance you run and brings it under the same roof.
Nothing is there until you add it.
Applications, widgets, the plugins that wire apps into each other — every one of them is something you go and get, when you want it. The core runs what you have installed and has no opinion about what that should be.
Applications
Whole apps that plug into the same core and appear alongside the rest.
Widgets
Small surfaces for the dashboard, or floating over any app you like.
Plugins
Extensions that add capability to an app, or connect two of them together.
Install what you need. Remove what you don’t.
There is no canonical Nucleus setup. Two people running it can share almost nothing beyond the core and both be using it correctly.
- Start with the core. On its own it runs, loads what you give it and does nothing else. That is a working Nucleus — empty, but yours.
- Add the parts that match your life. Storage if you have files to keep. Photos if you have a library. Nothing because you were told to.
- Change your mind later. Applications come and go without taking the system with them. Removing one is a normal thing to do.
Independent, but not isolated
Every application is a complete product on its own. Inside Nucleus it also gets identity, storage, notifications and a place on your dashboard — and can hand things to the apps next to it.
Your server. Your data. Your Nucleus.
Nucleus is designed to run on infrastructure you control, and to keep working whether or not anyone else is still around to run a service for you.
Runs on your infrastructure
One deployment on hardware you chose. No vendor account is required for the system to start.
Your data stays in your database
Files on your disks, records in your database, backups you can take and restore yourself.
Nothing reaches out unasked
Integrations with outside services exist, and each one is something you switch on deliberately.
Built in the open
The code is public and readable. If you want to know what a part does, you can go and look.
And the honest part
Self-hosting moves responsibility along with control: updates, backups and access are yours to run. Nucleus tries to make that work boring and predictable rather than pretending it isn’t there.
Be in the Nucleus of it.
One system, arranged around you, running on hardware you can point at. Have a look at how it is built — or start putting yours together.