skip to content
▚shortwind
Docs/Cloud

Docs/Cloud

Quickstart

Everything you need to go from nothing to a live URL — create an account, install the CLI, publish.

Quickstart

This is the whole path from nothing to a live page. You set up three things once (an account, the CLI, and login), then publish with one command. Cloud hosts any HTML file: you do not need to write it with Shortwind, and you do not need to be inside a project.

Before you start

You need two things:

1. A Shortwind account. Go to shortwind.dev/cloud and click Start free. Publishing and serving are free; you only pay if you later bring a custom domain (Pro, $5/mo).

2. The CLI. Cloud is driven by the @shortwind/cli package (beta). Unlike the Core tooling, which lives inside a project as a dev dependency, shortwind cloud is a standalone command you run from any directory. Install it globally:

npm i -g @shortwind/cli@beta

Or skip the install and run it on demand with npx @shortwind/cli@beta cloud <verb>. Either way it behaves the same from anywhere; your login is stored under ~/.shortwind/, not in the current folder. The examples below use the shortwind command.

1. Log in

shortwind cloud login

This links your machine to your account with the OAuth device flow. The CLI prints a short code and a URL (shortwind.dev/cloud/device); open the URL in the browser where you signed up, enter the code, and approve. Your token is then stored under ~/.shortwind/ and you will not have to log in again on this machine:

logged in as you@example.com (active account: acct_xxxxxxxxxxxx)

There is no separate init step. login creates the local home for you.

2. Publish a page

Any HTML file works, from any directory. Make one:

echo '<h1>Hello from my agent</h1>' > hello.html

That is ordinary HTML with no Shortwind in it, and that is fine. Cloud hosts the file as-is.

Publish it:

shortwind cloud publish hello.html

You get a live URL back:

published https://<slug>.shortwind.app
id: pg_xxxxxxxxxxxx
version: v1

Open the URL: your page is live, served free from the edge. Choose the slug and who can see it with --domain and --visibility:

shortwind cloud publish hello.html --domain my-first-page --visibility public

3. Change it

To ship an edit to the same URL, update the page by its id (from the publish output above, or from shortwind cloud find):

shortwind cloud update pg_xxxxxxxxxxxx hello.html
# published https://my-first-page.shortwind.app
# version: v2

That is the core loop: publish once to create a page, update to revise it. Every publish and update is a new immutable version; nothing is overwritten.

Do I need Shortwind recipes?

No. Cloud hosts any HTML file; recipes are an optional convenience for people who already author with Core. If a page you publish uses @recipe shorthand (like class="@card") and you run publish from inside a project that has a recipes/ directory, Cloud expands that shorthand to Tailwind server-side at publish time. Everything else, including plain HTML, is served exactly as written. See how recipes travel with a publish for the details.

Next