makerclay

License: First Million Stays Yours License. Free to use, no matter who you are or what you use it for. It only ever costs money if you sell or host a product built on this software and that product makes you more than $1M in a year. Under that line you owe nothing, sign nothing, register nowhere.

| Free under | Above it | Becomes MIT | |---|---|---| | $1M/year from products built on it | 3% of the excess | 2028-02-20 (this version) |

Plain answers: hyperclay.com/host-program · binding text in LICENSE · questions: [email protected]

Point it at a folder. Every .html file in it becomes an addressable, saveable, versioned document you can edit in the browser.

npx makerclay ./my-site

That prints a setup link. Open it, choose a password, and you are looking at your files. Drop an HTML file into my-site/files/ and it is live. Open it, click something, type, save: the file on disk changes. No database holds your work, and if you delete makerclay tomorrow the folder is still a folder full of ordinary HTML.

No environment variables, no services, no account.

What you get

A dashboard, a source editor, a version of every document on every save, share links with view or edit grants, private files, collections that accept form submissions, and optional signups that give someone else their own sandboxed copy of one of your documents.

The client is served from your own box, never a CDN.

Commands

makerclay [dir]                start the server (default: ./makerclay)
makerclay setup-token          print the one-time setup key again
makerclay reset-password       print a one-time link to choose a new password

makerclay ls [folder]          list what is there
makerclay mv <from> <to>       move or rename
makerclay rm <path>            move to the trash
makerclay share <path>         mint a share link (--edit for write access)
makerclay restore <path> [ver] restore a version

makerclay export               archive everything into one .tgz
makerclay import <f.tgz>       restore an archive into an empty directory
makerclay eject                copy makerclay's own pages into your files
makerclay repair --ui          put the shipped pages back
makerclay doctor               read-only health report and repair plan

The terminal can do everything the dashboard can, which is the escape hatch that makes the dashboard safe to hack on. makerclay doctor never changes anything: it reads the database on a read-only connection and never takes the lock, so it works against a running server too. --conformance is the exception and boots a real host to test this build against the spec.

Requirements

Node 22.13 or newer. Nothing else.

Full documentation, configuration reference and reverse-proxy configs: https://github.com/panphora/makerclay.

First Million Stays Yours License; see the matrix at the top of this README and the LICENSE file.