Nu – the interaction primitive

Build apps in one primitive that spans your whole stack — databases, UIs, AI agents, and services. No glue. 50x less code.

About • Build • Quickstart • Nu STD • Apps • Spec • Examples • Docs • Community

ℹ️ About

The primitive Nu is built on, in three words.

A tiny script keeps its values in memory and calls functions on them. Real apps don't stay there. Values live in a database, arrive from a browser form, render into a dashboard, get recomputed by a background job. Almost none of the code is about the values anymore — it's all interaction between systems.

Nu makes interaction the primitive.

• Ref — a name for a value, wherever it lives: a KV slot, a UI text block, an LLM endpoint, a remote object.
• Interaction — what you do with a Ref: read, write, branch, iterate, compose.
• Fabric — binds Refs to a real system. Compose as many as you need; they all speak the same primitive.

Same primitive, different system. One Ref for any resource, one Interaction for any op. Setting a browser text block is the same interaction as setting a KV slot.

Nu is the reference implementation of the interaction model in Python.

🧱 Build with Nu

A few of Nu's fabrics — state, UIs, cluster, models. Same Python, same code shape.

Persistent state

Persistent state. Stores any Python type.

Reach any value by name; it survives restarts. Same code local or sharded across a cluster.

• Serverless, scales to terabytes
• Store any Python type

...
class DB(nu.Shape):
    hits = nustd.kv.IntRef.slot()

# +1 to a persistent counter, starting at 0
op = DB.hits.init(0) >> DB.hits.inc()

app = nu.With(
    nustd.kv.rocksdb_navigator(".db"),
    body=nustd.kv.auto_flow_atomic(op),
)
...

Powered by virtuals · rdbpy · RocksDB · LMDB.

Live browser UIs

Reactive UIs from Python. No JS, no build step, no websocket you had to write.

A text block, a chart, a form — set them like variables, they render. Update the value, the browser updates itself.

• 50+ components out of the box
• Live updates for free

...
class Dashboard(nustd.ui.Page):
    hello = nustd.ui.TextRef.slot()

# renders live in the browser
op = Dashboard.hello.set("Hello, browser.")

app = nustd.ui.serve(Dashboard, op)
...

Powered by React · Zustand.

Distributed execution

Same code runs local or across the cluster. No worker pool to run.

Teleport any Nu tree to any worker; it runs there and returns the result. Where it runs is a binding, not a rewrite.

• Same code, local or remote
• Distribute with a single line

...
class DB(nu.Shape):
    hits = nustd.kv.IntRef.slot()

# any Nu op
op = DB.hits.init(0) >> DB.hits.inc()

# same op — teleport it to a worker
remote = nustd.cluster.Teleport(op, target="gpu-0")

app = nu.With(
    nustd.cluster.RayCluster(),
    body=remote,
)
...

Powered by Ray.

LLM calls

One wire, N providers. Ollama, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, xAI — same call.

LLM chat as a Ref. Swap the model string, keep the code. Local models and hosted APIs meet at the same interface.

• Add intelligence to any Nu app
• 7 providers out of the box

...
class Bot(nu.Service):
    chat = nustd.llm.ChatRef.method(temperature=0.7)

# ask the model
op = Bot.chat(prompt="one-line haiku about rust")

app = nu.With(
    nustd.llm.ollama(Bot, host="localhost", model="qwen2.5:7b"),
    body=op,
)
...

And more

Nu is batteries-included and covers the common cases. In-memory state, proxy, HTTP, Python objects, Claude Code, local parallelism — same model, same shape, same primitive as the four above.

→ Explore all fabrics

🏁 Quickstart

Install, run a demo, start hacking.

01 · Install

Python 3.10+ · everything ships in the wheel.

pip install "nustd[all]"

02 · Run a demo

Each one boots a live browser dashboard and picks up where it left off on restart. The source sits in examples/; run one with python examples/<name>.py.

counter	sampled
A live counter, persistent across restarts. python examples/counter.py	An infinite series, live-sampled into a line-chart. python examples/sampled.py
movies
A movie tracker: form, filterable table, detail pages. python examples/movies.py

03 · Start hacking

• Read the docs — tutorials, how-tos, and the fabric reference.
• Browse examples — full source for every demo, plus more programs to steal from.

🔋 Nu STD

Batteries included. 25 modules ship on top of the kernel. The kernel holds one fabric of its own, nu.mem: in-memory state over plain dicts, users.age.set(12), and the locals a program keeps while it runs, nu.let(0, lambda n: n.set(n + 1)).

Eleven are fabrics. Bind one and every Ref inside the bracket reaches a real system.

The rest re-surface Python's standard library. Call them anywhere, no binding. Same names, same call shape as the stdlib, except a call hands back a tree, not a value. So it composes into the rest of the program.

pip install nucore "nustd[all]"      # every backend
pip install nucore "nustd[kv,ui]"    # or one extra per fabric

📦 Apps built on Nu

End-user tools written as Nu programs.

📐 Spec

Nu is a reference implementation of the interaction model — a language-agnostic specification of what an interaction is, how Refs name locations, and how Interactions compose into programs.

nustackdev/interaction-model

👥 Community

Nu README badge

Add a Nu badge to your README if you're building on Nu:

[![Nu](https://img.shields.io/badge/built%20with-Nu-%237A4CE0)](https://github.com/nustackdev/nu)

Contributing to Nu

Considering contributing to Nu? Start by opening an issue or a PR — the codebase is small and readable, and the model is stable enough to build on.

More questions?

1. Read the docs
2. Open a feature request or report a bug
3. Join the Discord community

License

Apache-2.0