Deploy from your AI tool

Connect your AI coding tool to Dockhold and let it deploy and manage your apps for you.

Dockhold runs a remote MCP server — the open protocol AI tools use to call out to other services. Connect your tool once with a token, and it can list your apps, read their status and logs, deploy a repo, restart an app, and set variables — all as you, limited to your own account. No copy-pasting config back and forth; the tool does it directly.

1. Create an API token

In the dashboard, go to Settings → API tokens and create one. Pick the access it needs:

• Read-only — list apps, read status and logs. Good for “what’s broken?” without risk.
• Read & deploy — also deploy, restart, and set variables.

Copy the token when it’s shown — it starts with dh_mcp_ and is shown once. You can set an optional expiry and restrict it to specific IPs.

2. Add Dockhold to your tool

Point your tool’s MCP configuration at the Dockhold server and pass your token as a bearer header:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dockhold": {
      "url": "https://api.dockhold.eu/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer dh_mcp_live_…" }
    }
  }
}

The exact place this goes depends on the tool — Claude Desktop and Cursor both take an MCP server URL plus headers; drop the dockhold block into their MCP settings and restart the tool. Replace dh_mcp_live_… with the token you copied.

3. Ask it to do something

Once connected, your tool can run these on your account:

• list_apps — your apps, with status and URLs.
• get_app_status — one app’s deploy status, URL, and last error.
• get_app_logs — recent runtime logs, for debugging a deploy.
• deploy_app — deploy a new app from a public GitHub repo.
• redeploy_app — restart an app.
• set_app_variable — set a configuration variable.

So “deploy github.com/me/my-app to Dockhold and tell me when it’s live” is a single instruction — the tool calls deploy_app, then polls get_app_status until the URL is up.

What it can’t do

A token only ever does what you could do in the dashboard, on your own apps, within your plan. It can’t reach anyone else’s apps, can’t change billing or delete your account, and a read-only token can’t deploy. Secrets still belong in the Vault — the tool can set plain config variables, but anything that looks like a key or password is refused, with a pointer to the Vault. Lost a token or done with it? Revoke it on the same settings page and it stops working immediately.

The one rule that still matters

Whether you deploy by hand or through your AI tool, the app itself has to listen on 0.0.0.0:$PORT. That’s the whole contract — everything else Dockhold handles.

Create a token →