🦋 Nika 0.63.0 — Serve Ops

🦋 Nika 0.63.0 — Serve Ops

Inference as Code · April 2, 2026 · 16 commits

🧪 Tests	🔧 Builtins	📦 Transforms	🌐 Providers
9,500+	41	39	9

✧ infer · ⎈ exec · ☄ fetch · ⊛ invoke · ❋ agent

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🐧 Nika Goes to Production

This release is about one thing: making nika serve deployable on real Linux servers. Not localhost. Not Docker-on-Mac. Actual systemd-managed services with environment files, automatic restart, and resource limits.

We wrote a proper nika-serve.service unit file with Type=notify readiness signaling — meaning systemd knows exactly when Nika is ready to accept requests, not just that the process started. Combined with Restart=always, MemoryMax, and CPUQuota, you get a production deployment that recovers from crashes and stays within resource bounds.

# /etc/systemd/system/nika-serve.service
[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/nika serve --bind 0.0.0.0:3000
EnvironmentFile=%h/.nika/.env
Restart=always
MemoryMax=2G
CPUQuota=200%

🔄 Hot Reload Without Downtime

The new POST /v1/reload endpoint re-scans the workflow directory and picks up new, modified, or deleted *.nika.yaml files — without restarting the server. Zero downtime deploys become trivial:

# Deploy new workflows
rsync -av workflows/ server:~/workflows/

# Reload without restart
curl -X POST http://server:3000/v1/reload \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"
# → {"workflows_found": 42}

Running jobs are not interrupted. New requests pick up the updated workflow catalog immediately.

🔑 CI/Docker Key Injection

API key management was interactive-only before this release — fine for a developer laptop, painful for CI and Docker. Two new flags solve this:

Flag	Use Case	Example
--stdin	Piped from secret manager	echo $KEY | nika provider set anthropic --stdin
--key-env	Read from env var by name	nika provider set anthropic --key-env ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

Both write to the encrypted NikaVault — same XChaCha20Poly1305 + Argon2i encryption as interactive mode. The difference is they work headless.

🛡️ Security & Bug Fixes

Four targeted fixes that matter for anyone running nika serve in production:

• 🔧 JSON coercion in fetch — When fetch: received a JSON array or object encoded as a string, downstream with: bindings got the raw string instead of native JSON. Now properly coerced back to structured types.

• 🔐 Vault NIKA-135 — Clear error message when vault decryption fails (wrong passphrase, corrupted file). Added nika vault reset subcommand and nika doctor vault health check for recovery.

• 🛡️ NIKA-053 $() refinement — Command injection detection was too aggressive: $() in static YAML templates (the author's intent) was blocked alongside $() injected via dynamic data. Now only dynamic injection is blocked. Fixes false positives on python3 -c patterns.

• ⚙️ working_dir from nika.toml — The [tools] working_dir config was parsed but silently ignored by both CLI runner and serve executor. Now properly wired through to exec: verb cwd resolution. Your nika.toml config actually works.

💡 Quick Example

Deploy Nika as a systemd service on any Linux box:

# Install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/supernovae-st/nika/main/install.sh | sh

# Configure
nika provider set anthropic --key-env ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

# Deploy service
sudo cp nika-serve.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now nika-serve

# Verify
curl http://localhost:3000/v1/workflows

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📦 Install

	Method	Command
🚀	Quick	curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/supernovae-st/nika/main/install.sh | sh
🍺	Homebrew	brew install supernovae-st/tap/nika
📦	npm	npx @supernovae-st/nika
🦀	Cargo	cargo install nika
🐳	Docker	docker run --rm ghcr.io/supernovae-st/nika:0.63.0
💻	VS Code	Search "Nika" or ext install supernovae.nika-lang
🪟	Scoop	scoop bucket add nika https://github.com/supernovae-st/scoop-nika && scoop install nika
🐧	AUR	yay -S nika-bin

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🦋 Nika Evolution
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
v0.42  ████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  8,188 tests
v0.48  ████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  8,200 tests
v0.52  ██████████████░░░░░░░░  8,938 tests
v0.56  ███████████████░░░░░░░  9,093 tests
v0.58  ████████████████░░░░░░  9,109 tests
v0.61  ██████████████████░░░░  9,407 tests
v0.63  ██████████████████████  9,500 tests ← you are here
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🔧 41 builtins · 📦 39 transforms · 🌐 7+1+1 providers · 🦀 17 crates

Made with 💜 by SuperNovae Studio — Open Source, AGPL-3.0

Full Changelog: v0.62.0...v0.63.0