Files
netris-nestri/README.md
Wanjohi 77d4782c86 docs: split CLAUDE.md by scope, and say what this repo is
CLAUDE.md was 1,324 lines and all of it was about the TypeScript half, written
before there was another half. Every line of it loaded on every turn regardless
of what was being worked on, which is a real cost paid constantly for context
that is usually irrelevant.

Split by where it applies, so each guide loads when you are in the directory it
describes:

  packages/core/CLAUDE.md   694   domain modules, fn(), actor, errors, auth
  apps/api/CLAUDE.md        284   routes, registration, error flow
  docs/alchemy.md           345   stages, bindings, secrets, the CLI
  CLAUDE.md                  72   the repo, both toolchains, two hard rules

Nothing was rewritten or dropped — the three files are the original text,
verified identical after the split. What the root file now carries is only what
is true repo-wide: the layout, the commands, where the detail lives, and the two
rules that are not style preferences. One of those is that nothing closed may
enter this repo, which is here because it has already been caught once.

The README described a streaming platform in four bullets and did not mention
that half the repository is Rust that runs inside a virtual machine. It now says
what each component does, why a micro-VM rather than a container, what is
deliberately absent, and what decides whether a thing is open — data is, capacity
is not.

It also says plainly that this is mid-rewrite and the docs are behind. Someone
arriving at a repo whose documentation does not match its tree should be told
that by the README rather than discover it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-26 18:23:42 +03:00

3.5 KiB

Nestri logo

Run your games on a GPU you don't own — or one you do. Nestri puts an interactive workload in a hardware-accelerated virtual machine and streams it to you over QUIC, at a latency that lets you play rather than watch.

Note

This repository is mid-rewrite, and the documentation is behind the code. The guest-side components arrived recently and their docs are thin. Nothing here is stable yet: expect directories to move and interfaces to change. Proper documentation is on the way — issues and questions are welcome in the meantime, and are genuinely useful for deciding what to write first.

What is here

Two halves that meet over the network and share very little else.

The control plane — TypeScript, on Cloudflare Workers

apps/api The public REST API. Identity, teams, machines, games, pairing.
apps/auth A self-hosted OpenAuth issuer — Steam and SSH-key login.
packages/core The domain: every table, every operation, no HTTP.
packages/auth Shared auth types and subjects.

Postgres for state, Alchemy for infrastructure. See docs/alchemy.md.

The guest — Rust, inside the box

These run inside a virtual machine, beside the game. None of them talk to the control plane.

apps/nescope A headless Wayland compositor for one fullscreen client. A lighter answer to the same problem gamescope solves.
apps/nescapture A Vulkan implicit layer. It captures frames from inside the workload's own process and encodes them on the GPU that drew them — no copy out to the CPU and back.
apps/neswire Audio capture and transport.
crates/nesprotocol The wire types all three share, so no two ends can drift apart silently.

The hypervisor these run under is nesbox, a separate repository: a micro-VM with a real GPU in it, using virtio-gpu native context rather than passthrough, so one card can host several boxes at once.

Why a virtual machine

A container shares the host kernel, which makes strong isolation hard and a GPU harder. A micro-VM boots in about as long, isolates properly, and — with native context — gets close to bare-metal graphics. That choice is what makes "many sandboxes, one GPU" possible instead of one tenant per card.

Getting started

bun install
bun dev                      # control plane, local Cloudflare runtime

cargo build --workspace      # guest components
cargo test --workspace

The Rust components expect a Linux host with a Wayland-capable GPU stack. They are not much use on their own yet — they are pieces of a box, and the thing that assembles a box is not open yet.

Status

Working: the API, auth, the domain model, and the guest components listed above.

Not here yet: the box lifecycle, storage, the edge, and the client. Some of that will open as it is written; some is deliberately closed. What decides which is whether it handles your data — that half is open on principle — or decides our capacity, which is the part we sell.

Contributing

Early, and the ground moves. The most useful contribution right now is telling us where the documentation failed you. Conventional commits; explain why in the body.

Licence

Apache 2.0.