Quickstart

This guide takes you from a signed-in dashboard account to a running virtual machine in three API calls. Everything you do here is reversible — destroy the VM when you're done and you'll have spent a few cents at most.

Before you start

You need three things:

• A NimbusNexus account. Sign up at nimbusnexus.net — you'll get a starter credit that covers this quickstart and then some.
• The curl command-line tool, or any HTTP client of your choice. Examples on this page use curl; the same calls work in any language.
• About five minutes.

You don't need SSH set up yet. We'll create a key as part of the second call.

1 · Generate an API key

Sign in to the dashboard and go to Settings → API keys → New key. Give the key a label you'll recognize later (e.g. quickstart) and copy the value somewhere safe — you only see it once.

Export it as an environment variable so the examples below can reference it:

export NIMBUS_KEY="nn_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

API keys are scoped to a single project. The default project that gets created with your account is fine for now; you can split workloads across projects later without rotating keys.

2 · Pick a region

NimbusNexus runs in four regions:

Pick the one closest to where your users (or your existing infrastructure) live. Latency between regions inside NimbusNexus is free; egress to the public internet is the only billable transfer.

You can ask the API for the canonical list at any time:

curl https://api.nimbusnexus.net/v1/regions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NIMBUS_KEY"

3 · Create your first VM

The smallest VM that's useful for real work is a gp-1-2 — one vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 25 GB SSD. It costs about a penny an hour. Boot one in Virginia with:

curl -X POST https://api.nimbusnexus.net/v1/vms \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NIMBUS_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "quickstart",
    "size": "gp-1-2",
    "region": "us-east-1",
    "image": "ubuntu-24.04"
  }'

The response includes the VM's id and current state. State will be provisioning for the first few seconds, then running:

{
  "id": "vm_01H...",
  "name": "quickstart",
  "size": "gp-1-2",
  "region": "us-east-1",
  "image": "ubuntu-24.04",
  "state": "provisioning",
  "ipv4": null,
  "created_at": "2026-05-19T18:30:00Z"
}

Poll the VM once a second until state is running and ipv4 is populated — that takes about 28 seconds on a cached image, or 60–90 seconds on a first-time pull.

What you've done

You've created an API key, picked a region, and provisioned a real virtual machine. The same three-call pattern works for every resource in the API: POST to create, GET to read, DELETE to destroy. Authentication, region codes, and resource ids are stable across resource types — the API was designed so you can learn it once and apply it to anything.

Next steps

• Browse the API reference to see every endpoint with parameters, request/response schemas, and error codes.
• Read about authentication to understand how API keys work alongside project scoping, expiring tokens, and webhook signing.
• Read conventions to learn the patterns the API follows everywhere — idempotency, pagination, error shapes, long-running operations.
• Try the interactive API explorer at api.nimbusnexus.net/docs/external — it's a Swagger UI wired up to the live API; "Try it out" makes real calls against your account.

When you're done, destroy the VM so you stop being billed:

curl -X DELETE https://api.nimbusnexus.net/v1/vms/vm_01H... \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NIMBUS_KEY"