nutsh

Nutanix Prism Central, in your terminal.

Website · Usage guide · Keys · Compared with ncli, acli, nuclei · Changelog

Nutsh is a keyboard-driven terminal UI for Prism Central, in the shape of k9s. It runs on your laptop and talks to the v4 REST API over HTTPS: no SSH, no agent, nothing installed on the cluster. You get every resource kind behind one prompt, names instead of UUIDs, and a guardrail in front of anything that changes state.

It is for the people who live in Prism Central: administrators and SREs who want the VM table, the failed tasks and the alerts without a browser tab, consultants who move between several Prism Centrals a day, and Community Edition home labs.

0.2.0. 0.1.0 was the first release meant for other people; 0.2.0 adds nutsh demo and attested builds. One author, a few months of daily use against one Prism Central (pc.7.6) and a mock built from the published pc.2024.3 API specs. Nobody else has run it for a week yet. Expect rough edges; report what you find.

Before you point it at anything real, know what it holds and does:

• It stores a Prism Central password: in the OS keyring where one exists, otherwise in a 0600 file under $XDG_STATE_HOME/nutsh/secrets/. Never in the config file, argv, a log or the cache.
• A rejected credential is presented once, then everything stops. There is no retry path that can reach an authenticating request. This program has locked out a lab account in its past; the rules that stop that from happening again are pinned by tests, and CONTRIBUTING.md names them.
• --readonly refuses every mutation before the wire. Use it for a first look.
• Requests are paced from the rate limit the Prism Central advertises, never faster.
• The on-disk cache is an inventory of your infrastructure, 0600, per context; nutsh cache clear removes it.

macOS and Linux today. No Windows build yet; WSL works.

Every release from 0.2.0 on is built by CI from its tag and carries a GitHub artifact attestation: gh attestation verify <archive> --repo Fen0l/nutsh checks one.

Not on crates.io yet.

nutsh demo                                                   # no Prism Central yet? two invented ones, every screen populated (fuller than a real v4 API)
nutsh ctx add home --host pc.example.com --username admin    # one Prism Central, one context
nutsh ctx login home                                         # asks for the password once, checks it, stores it
nutsh --readonly                                             # the Dashboard, nothing can change

Then, inside:

• : opens the palette. Type vm, alerts, tasks, or any of 232 kinds by name or alias.
• / filters the rows in front of you. :search web looks everywhere, then asks the Prism Central.
• ⏎ drills into a row's children; y opens its detail; esc goes back.
• a lists what can be done to the row, greyed where you may not, with the reason beside it.
• :ctx switches to another Prism Central. ? shows the main keys. q quits.

If the certificate is rejected, that is normal: Prism Central's default certificate is self-signed and marked as a CA, which no modern TLS library accepts as a server certificate. Install a signed one, or add the context with --insecure (the header then says so).

Tab completion for the shell: source <(nutsh completions zsh); bash and fish likewise.

• Every kind, one prompt. 232 kinds across all 20 v4 namespaces. 74 have hand-picked columns; the rest get a layout derived from the schema. Wherever the API returns a UUID you see the name.
• Pages. Attention puts unresolved alerts, failed tasks, powered-off VMs and the hosts side by side. Disaster Recovery gathers remote Prism Centrals, policies, plans and recent jobs.
• Guarded actions. 478 of them. Read-only refuses before the wire, delete makes you type the name, bulk stops at five rows, your own [[guardrails]] deny or confirm by context, kind and action. Every attempt lands in :journal, refused ones included.
• Honest emptiness. When something is missing it says why - which API namespace this Prism Central does not serve, or which version a resource needs - instead of an empty box.
• Several Prism Centrals. A context per environment, switched in one command - or read side by side: :ctx lab dr lists both in every table, each in its own colour under a CONTEXT column, /dr keeps one of them, a row acts against its own Prism Central, and a credential one of them refuses ends that one alone. -c lab,dr does the same from the shell.
• Useful outside the TUI. nutsh --check prints what your Prism Central serves. nutsh vm --snapshot prints one frame; --format csv|json prints the table for scripts.
• Gentle on the Prism Central. Cached per context, ETag revalidation, paced per endpoint from the advertised tier. :activity shows every request the session made.

The full key map and every palette command are in docs/keys.md; the config file, cache, logging and pacing in docs/reference.md.

• 1,100+ tests, run on Linux and macOS on every pull request, plus a weekly cargo audit and CodeQL. make ci is the gate and mirrors CI exactly.
• The lockout rules, the pacing rules and the "never carries neither a credential nor a session" rule each have a named test that fails if they are undone.
• Verified against: pc.7.6 (the author's lab, continuously) and a mock built from the pc.2024.3 specs (every test). Other versions are negotiated at connect time - --check prints what yours answered - but have not been run by anyone yet. If you run it against another version, say so.
• v4 coverage, generated from the catalog and checked for drift in CI:

Breadth - how much of the v4 API the catalog models.

Depth - the curated path, and the explorer beneath it.

docs/coverage.md breaks this down per namespace.

One thing to know about the v4 API. Prism Central's own console still reads several entity types through the older v3 groups endpoint, and those have no populated v4 collection behind them. So a pane can say no recovery plans while the console lists several. An empty v4 collection means the v4 API has none; it does not prove the Prism Central has none. docs/nutanix-v4-api.md has the cases and why v3 is not implemented.

ncli and acli run on a CVM over SSH and see one cluster. nuclei runs on the Prism Central VM over SSH. The console is a browser tab. Terraform and Ansible declare state; they do not show it. Nutsh is the interactive one that runs on your laptop, over HTTPS, with nothing installed anywhere. nutsh.dev/compare goes tool by tool, and says when Nutsh is the wrong choice.

• Usage guide: first connection, the screens, guardrails, the cache
• docs/keys.md: every key, every palette command, every direct action key
• docs/reference.md: the config file, cache, logging, request pacing
• docs/coverage.md: v4 coverage per namespace, generated
• docs/nutanix-v4-api.md: what the v4 API does that its own docs do not say
• SECURITY.md: what is stored where, and how to report a defect privately
• CHANGELOG.md: what changed, release by release

Issues and pull requests are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md has the build, the tests, and the invariants that stop somebody undoing a fix without knowing what it prevented. Read it before touching the HTTP client: this program talks to systems with lockout policies.

Built with a lot of AI assistance, and said so plainly: the author wrote the mockups and the rules about what it must never do, and Claude wrote most of the rest. Every change is reviewed by a human before it goes near a lab, and the safeguards against an accidental deletion were designed by that human. The tests and the guardrails are in the repository, and they are what to judge it on.

MIT. The text is in LICENSE.

Nutanix, Prism Central and AHV are trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. This project is independent, and not affiliated with or endorsed by Nutanix.