From nothing to a live hosted instance in one command — scaffold, email code, publish. What each step does and how long the first one takes.

One command scaffolds the app, signs you in and deploys it:

pnpm dlx create-hogsend my-app --cloud

It asks for an email, mails a six-digit code, takes the code back, and publishes. There is no password anywhere in the flow.

--cloud drives the app's own hogsend CLI, which is installed with the app's dependencies. It needs create-hogsend to have installed them — the default. A run with --no-install has no CLI to deploy with and says so.

What each step does

1. Scaffold

The same app you would get without --cloud: src/journeys/, src/emails/, migrations, a docker-compose.yml for local work. Nothing about it is cloud-specific, and nothing is written that ties it to us.

2. The email code

✓ We sent a code to you@example.com. It is good for 10 minutes.

Paste the code. A brand-new address gets an account, an organization and a production environment; an address that already has one is signed in — the prompt is the same either way.

Three wrong codes and the code is dead; run the command again for a fresh one.

3. Publish

The first publish provisions your instance before it deploys your code. You will see the phases:

  Resolving environment ...
  Packing ...
  my-app → production · 75 files · 0.19MB → 0.07MB gzipped · engine 0.62.0 (package.json)
  Uploading ...
  provisioning your instance — creating database, workers, DNS
  instance ready — deploying your app
  building
  preflight
  succeeded

The provisioning lines appear once, on the first publish. Later publishes go straight from Uploading to the build phases.

Doing it in two steps instead

--cloud is optional. Scaffold now, deploy when you are ready:

pnpm dlx create-hogsend my-app
cd my-app
pnpm hogsend publish

hogsend publish with no session offers to sign you in and then continues the same publish — you do not have to run a login command first. On a machine with no terminal (CI, an agent) it refuses instead, naming the command to run.

Headless and CI

Everything above works without a terminal. The code is read from stdin:

echo 123456 | pnpm dlx create-hogsend my-app -y --cloud --email you@example.com

--cloud without --email in a headless run is refused before anything is scaffolded, so a CI job never ends up with a half-finished directory:

--cloud needs --email <address> when there is no terminal to ask in.
  The sign-in code is mailed there; pipe it back on stdin:
    echo 123456 | create-hogsend my-app -y --cloud --email you@example.com

Exit codes: a cloud failure exits non-zero with the scaffold complete and usable. The app on disk works locally regardless, and the outro prints the two commands that resume the deploy.

If the deploy does not finish

Nothing is lost. The scaffold is complete, and the outro tells you exactly how to pick it up:

  Your app is complete and works locally. To finish the deploy:
    pnpm hogsend signup --email you@example.com
    pnpm hogsend publish

After it is live

cd my-app
pnpm hogsend open        # the environment's page in the dashboard
pnpm hogsend env pull    # write the live API URL + key into .env

hogsend env pull merges HOGSEND_API_URL and HOGSEND_API_KEY into the .env beside your app. It never rewrites the file — existing variables, comments and ordering survive — and a key already set to a different value is reported and refused rather than clobbered. The key is never printed.

Your session lives in ~/.hogsend/credentials.json (mode 0600, one entry per cloud host) and is never printed. Revoke it with hogsend logout, or from Settings → CLI sessions in the dashboard.

Deploying again

From anywhere inside the app:

pnpm hogsend publish

The scaffold root is found by walking up to the nearest package.json depending on @hogsend/engine. Everything your repository ignores is left out, and .git, node_modules, dist and every .env* are excluded unconditionally, whatever .gitignore says.

Cloud quickstart