Quickstart

You need Forge and a working Claude Code CLI. Forge drives the CLI you already have, so there is nothing to configure and no key to paste.

1. Describe the app

Write what it does and who uses it. Name the people, not just the features: “members can start a voice channel, moderators can kick” beats “voice support”.

a bar for my crew: servers, channels, invites, and a voice
channel anyone can join. moderators can kick.

drafting spec ............ 6 screens, 4 collections
building ................. ok 12.8 min
verifying ................ compiles, first paint clean

2. Steer it

The build console shows the plan as it lands and asks when it hits a real decision. Every step is a local commit, so a correction is a rollback plus one more sentence — never a fresh start.

3. Publish it

The tile menu has Publish to cloud. That uploads a built bundle and its manifest; your workspace stays on your machine. Anyone with the link can then install it into their own Forge.

Give the app a backend

Ask for it in the prompt and the agent wires it up. This is the whole surface:

const { space } = await forge.cloud.spaces.create('The Bar');
const chat = forge.cloud.channel(space.id, 'general');

await chat.send({ text: 'ahoy' });
chat.subscribe((m) => render(m));           // live
await chat.history({ after: cursor });      // resume

const call = forge.cloud.call(space.id);   // voice, peer to peer
call.join(localStream, (user, stream) => attach(user, stream));

Keep running when the window closes

A call should not drop because someone closed the window. Hold the background and the shell parks the app alive; pin a tray chip so it is obvious what is still running.

forge.background.hold();                     // close hides, not quits
forge.tray.set('●', 'In call · The Bar');
// later
forge.tray.clear(); forge.background.release();

Measure it

Report what your app does and read it back on its Analytics page. Events are batched, session ids are yours and never joined to an account, and raw rows expire after thirty days — the daily rollup is what the charts read.

forge.cloud.track('call.joined', { channel: 'general' });
forge.cloud.track('invite.used');

Self-hosting

The service is one compose file: Caddy for TLS, Postgres for the store, Redis for fan-out between instances, MinIO for blobs, and an hourly database dump. Set five environment variables and bring it up.

$ cp .env.example .env   # secret, owner email, passwords
$ docker compose up -d --build
forge-cloud listening on :4600 · store postgres · fan-out redis

Without DATABASE_URL the service runs on SQLite instead — correct, tested the same way, and limited to one instance. The full guide is docs/cloud/DEPLOY.md in the repository.