Nixopus - New All-in-One Server Management Tool with Interesting Features

Introduction

Web configuration tools for server management and provisioning are very useful. Some local devops prefer to make all changes via VNC console, but they quickly change their position when they start to manage tens and hundreds of servers. Modern orchestration systems allow to create many groups of virtual or bare metal machines and automate many pre-configured tasks such as backups, swap, balancing, database setup, monitoring, firewall profiles and many others. The goal of the project is to create a versatile platform that meets the complex needs of developers who push the limits with their creative problem solving and advanced skills.

If you have to maintain many servers Nixopus is the perfect fit 'cause it provides many tool for maintaining servers out the box like provisioning, monitoring, tasks, logs and all of this can be configured using user-friendly web frontend. The Nixopus backend is written in Go and frontent in JavaScript, so there's no problem with maintaining or customizations which you will likely meet in heavy environments like enterprise Java or PHP software. Nixopus is open source so you're free to customize or improve it and contribute back to community.

Key features

• Better Project Hosting - Accelerated project setup on your machine. You can manage updates, collect statistics, use monitoring and set your own CI/CD pipelines.
• File Manager - Quickly access any path inside your bare metal or virtual instance using Nixopus Web App's File Manager with hotkeys, drag and drop, tree view, file synchronization and more.
• Notifications - When something happens to your instances, you need to know quickly. Nixopus can send you an email and also supports Slack or Discord webhooks.
• Terminal - secure web-based terminal with quick access to any instance. Very similar to Google Cloud Shell and AWS Cloud Shell. It supports themes, custom hotkeys and fonts.
• API - Nixopus can be used with other tools for automatic provisioning, logging, health checks, notifications and webhooks. See the API documentation here.
• UI customization: themes, fonts and languages.
• No telemetry: Your usage data stays on your infrastructure.

Installation

If you have a VPS or Bare Metal server, installing Nixopus is quite easy:

sudo bash -c "$(curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raghavyuva/nixopus/refs/heads/master/scripts/install.sh)"

Just run the above command and wait. In case of problems with your Linux distribution, there's a docker-compose configuration that includes the Caddy web server. When everything falls apart and the sky is gray, create the issue in the Nixopus Github repository.

UI and features

After successful installation and first login, we'll see a wizard, which is our virtual guide. The interface is solid and a bit minimalistic, so I guess many people will not need an extra guide. But let's dive deeper and discover all the hidden gems. Time to close it and look at the dashboard.

As you can see, the dashboard is cool and provides a lot of information:

• OS info: type, CPU model, uptime, last update
• Update button at the top to update the OS
• Disk usage including all mounted partitions
• Memory usage: used, free and total
• All Docker containers running on the host, their ids and even ports!
• the terminal at the bottom
• keyboard shortcuts for quick access to UI components

After a lot of information we move on to the "Self Host" menu. Nothing to expect here, just a window asking you to enter the URL of a Github repository and Nixopus will fetch it and install it on the host. Several repositories are pre-installed, but it's possible to add any project with a Dockerfile or custom build system - the project settings are extensive here. Time to move on - straight to the Nixopus settings:

Here the user can change his profile picture, preferred font and language and enable automatic update of Nixopus to the latest version.

File Manager is great for quick file monitoring. Console fanatics wouldn't agree, but for many people it's easier to click a button to check the contents of a directory on a VPS or dedicated server. Nixopus File Manager allows you to perform classic file operations: copy, move, rename, delete, get file info, upload a file, etc. Hotkey support and adjustable visibility of hidden files can make file management a bit more comfortable. If you have a single server it's not that helpful, but if you have ten or more - this is the big win!

Notifications are a must if you want to know what's happening with your instances. Nixpopus supports classic email, Slack or Discord. For email you need the SMPT server, for Slack and Discord you need webhooks. Here are the next notification events:

• Activity Notifications:
  • Team Updates
• Security Notifications:
  • Login Alerts
  • Password Changes
  • Security Alerts
• Updates and MarketingL
  • Product Updates
  • Newsletter
  • Promotions and special offers

Privacy

The Nixopus Privacy Policy states that the application hosted on your server does not collect any telemetry. The project does collect analytics about user behavior on its landing and documentation pages to improve the user experience.

Here are the key points:

• No telemetry is collected from the application hosted on user servers.
• Analytics are collected about user behavior on landing and documentation pages.
• The information collected is used to improve the user experience.
• Appropriate security measures are in place to protect user information.
• User rights include data retention and deletion: website analytics - 1 year, documentation usage data - 1 year, feedback and comments - until manually deleted.
• Third party services are used and cookies are used for tracking.

Things I don't like

1. The Sustainable Use license is a source-available license, but it doesn't qualify as a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) license because of its potential limitations.
2. It is in the early stages of development and relies on your contributions and financial support to continue improving. There is no clear roadmap yet.
3. I might be nitpicking, considering the server software is still in the alpha stage, but there is just no documentation at this point. The choice of support is not FOSS friendly again!
4. Telemetry on the official website and documentation page.

Final note

This is a very interesting compact management tool for VPS and bare-metal instances. Despite its relatively young age, it has a good subset of basic features: project hosting, notifications, file manager, UI customization, API support and more. If you're tired of gigantic interfaces like AWS or Azure, this is your ticket to escape - the small, compact project that just does the job and nothing else.