Deploy a site from the portal

For quick, one-off deploys you don’t need an API key or the CLI: an admin can publish a site straight from the portal by dropping a file into a modal.

Note

This is an admin-only convenience. It runs on the management plane (your forward-auth identity), not the ingest plane — so it needs no API key. Automated and CI publishing should still use scoped API keys.

Steps

1. Open the portal and make sure you’re logged in as an admin.
2. Click + Add site in the toolbar.
3. Drag a file onto the drop zone (or click to choose one). Accepted inputs:
   • a single .html file (served as index.html — it must be self-contained, i.e. inline its CSS/JS), or
   • a .zip or .tar.gz archive containing an index.html.
4. Fill in the slug (the subdomain) and, optionally, a group, title, description, and tags. The modal previews the resulting host, e.g. my-site.previews.example.com.
5. Click Deploy. The site goes live immediately at the shown URL.

How archives are handled

The archive format is detected from the file’s magic bytes, not its name. For a zip, if every file lives under one common top-level directory — as happens when you zip a folder (site/index.html, site/assets/…) — that wrapper directory is stripped so index.html ends up at the site root.

The same safety limits as the ingest API apply: the upload, total extracted size, and entry count are all capped (see configuration), and archive entries that escape the target directory or are symlinks are rejected.

Things to know

• Overwrites are silent. Deploying to an existing group/slug replaces the live site. The modal warns you when the target already exists. With versioning enabled the previous version is retained and can be rolled back.
• Wildcard DNS/TLS is a prerequisite. A freshly deployed site only resolves if your reverse proxy already serves *.<base>.
• You’re hosting arbitrary HTML/JS. Each site is its own origin (subdomain), which is the isolation boundary — keep deploys to content you trust.