What is Cloud

Shortwind Cloud is agent-native HTML hosting. An agent (or you, from the CLI) publishes one HTML file and gets a live URL back. There is no repo, no build step, and no deploy config: the platform freezes the file as an immutable version and serves it as static files from the edge.

It hosts any HTML, whether or not it uses Shortwind. If a page does use @recipe shorthand, Cloud expands it to Tailwind server-side at publish time; plain HTML is served exactly as written. And because identity lives in a machine-global home, the shortwind cloud command runs from any directory, not just inside a project.

Just want to publish something? Skip to the Quickstart: create a free account, install the CLI, and publish an HTML file in three commands. This page is the concept tour.

Core vs Cloud

They are two products, and Core is optional for Cloud: Cloud happily hosts plain HTML and only touches recipes when a page has them. It is still worth being clear about which one you are using.

	Core	Cloud
What it is	A build-time class layer you add to a project	A hosted service you publish pages to
How you install it	npm i -D into your project	npm i -g (or npx), run from any directory
Where it runs	Locally, in your bundler	On the edge, at publish time
You get	Plain Tailwind CSS in your build output	A live URL serving a frozen page
Needs recipes?	Yes; that is the whole point	No; recipes are optional
Auth	None; it is a local tool	An account and a device-flow token
Cost	Free and open source	Free to publish and serve; Pro for custom domains

Everything under the Core tab in the sidebar is about writing and expanding recipes in your own project. Everything under Cloud (these pages) is about publishing and hosting.

How they relate

If a page you publish uses recipes, Cloud runs the same @shortwind/core expander you use locally, only it runs at publish time on our side. The CLI uploads your HTML, your lockfile, and just the recipe families the page actually touches; the server expands @card and friends into byte-identical Tailwind, hashes the artifact, and stores it. Serving is then dumb static delivery, with no runtime expansion and no origin compute per view.

So the recipes you author for Core are the recipes Cloud publishes with, when you choose to use them. If a page references a recipe that is not present, that token expands to nothing and goes out as raw text, so compose only from recipes you actually have. Run shortwind cloud skill to see the palette available where you are publishing from. None of this applies to plain HTML, which is served untouched.

When to use Cloud

• Your agent needs to publish a page and hand back a URL in one step.
• You want a page to be durable and versioned without a Git repo.
• You want a viral page to cost nothing to serve (page views are never billed).
• You want to bring your own domain and have TLS handled for you (Pro).

If you are wiring Shortwind into an app you build and deploy yourself, you want Core. If you want us to host the output, you are in the right place.

Next

• Quickstart: log in, publish a file, get a URL.
• Publishing & versions: the immutable-version model, slugs, and visibility.
• The agent API: the v1 REST surface an agent drives.