Nihil is a minimal offensive environment made for security experts, hackers, and students. It gives you ready-to-use Docker images and a CLI so you can spin up a lab without wrestling with base distros or manual installs, transparent, modular, and built for real work.

Want to know more? Go to the project website.

Getting started

How to install Nihil: Get started / install.

The project documentation (images, CLI, usage) is available on the documentation site.

Customize an image

The following command asks for GitHub CLI authentication, creates or reuses a personal fork of nihil-images, and opens the interactive tool selector:

nihil image customize web

In the selector, use the arrow keys (or j/k) to move. Press / to search by tool, category, or command. Press v to enter visual mode, move with j/k to select a range, and press Space to toggle all selected tools. Press Enter to save, and q or Esc to cancel.

To use a group repository, add --repo owner/repo or its full GitHub URL.

Git remotes use SSH by default. Use --git-protocol https when HTTPS remotes are preferred.

Use --git-del to remove and re-clone the existing local source directory. This does not delete the remote GitHub repository.

Changes are stored on a nihil/<variant>-custom branch in the fork. With --no-push, the branch is only prepared locally. Switch the active source with:

nihil image switch personal
nihil image switch upstream
nihil image status

After pushing, trigger the fork's build workflow for a specific variant and install the image published in its GHCR namespace:

nihil image build full --wait
nihil install web

Use nihil image build to build all variants.