Nurbly
Git-style version control built for CAD. Essentially GitHub for mechanical design.
The problem. Software teams have Git, branches, and pull requests. Engineers
designing physical hardware still track revisions with file names like
part_v5_final.sldprt, or they pay for heavy enterprise PLM that is out of reach
for a smaller team. A whole discipline of careful, collaborative version control
simply never reached the people who move atoms.
What it is. Nurbly brings real version control and collaboration to CAD. Commits, branches, pull requests, forks, and releases, but for mechanical design. Engineers who move atoms deserve the tools that transformed how we move electrons.
How it works
I built Nurbly solo, on genuine bare Git and the Git LFS batch protocol rather than a lookalike. On top of that sits a PostgreSQL metadata layer with CAD-aware intelligence, including geometry analysis and bills of materials. A Rust backend on Axum and tokio serves it, a React and TypeScript front end drives it, and a Python and OpenCASCADE pipeline converts STEP files to GLB and computes geometry diffs between revisions.
The result is a browser-first workflow: an in-browser 3D viewer with assembly trees and interference detection, a bundled command-line tool for people who prefer the terminal, and a full collaboration layer so a team can review a design change the way software teams review code.
Stack
Bare Git and Git LFS, PostgreSQL, Rust (Axum and tokio), React and TypeScript, Python and OpenCASCADE. Built end to end by one person.