Deploy Astro to thin.host

Build an Astro site to dist/ and publish it from Claude Code, Cursor or one curl call. thin.host serves the static files and gives you a live URL right away. Your agent can do every step for you through the thin.host MCP server, or you can run one curl command.

At a glance

Before you start

• Requires: Node.js 22.12 or later (Astro does not support odd-numbered Node releases).
• A thin.host account. Sign up, then create an API key under Settings (for curl and the local MCP server), or connect your agent with OAuth as shown in Quickstart (MCP).

Create a project (skip if you have one)

npm create astro@latest

Set the base path

Until a domain points at it, a thin.host site lives under a sub-path: https://thin.host/s/<slug>/. Astro prefixes its bundled assets with the base option, but not your own links: write internal links with import.meta.env.BASE_URL. Pass the base on the command line for the preview build and leave it out for a custom domain, so the config only names your real domain.

// astro.config.mjs
import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';

export default defineConfig({
  site: 'https://www.example.com',
});

Pick the slug (my-site here) before you build the preview, and pass the same slug when you deploy.

Build

npm run build

The finished site is in dist/. That folder is what you deploy.

Deploy from your agent (MCP)

Connect thin.host to Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Codex or ChatGPT once (setup for each client), then ask:

Build this Astro project for thin.host with the slug my-site and publish the dist/ folder.

With the local server (uvx thinhost-mcp) the agent runs the build and calls publish_website with the absolute path of dist/; large builds are split across requests automatically. Later changes go out with update_website and sync=true, which also removes files the new build dropped.

The hosted connector (https://thin.host/mcp, used by claude.ai and ChatGPT) cannot read your disk. From a coding agent it uploads with the REST call below; otherwise it publishes from a public link to a zip or HTML file with publish_website_from_url.

Deploy with curl

cd dist && zip -r ../site.zip . && cd -
curl -F file=@site.zip -F title="My Astro site" -F slug=my-site \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THINHOST_API_KEY" \
  https://thin.host/v1/websites/archive

The JSON response includes url, the live address (https://thin.host/s/my-site/). To redeploy, upload the new zip to the site's archive endpoint; pages and assets missing from it are removed:

curl -F file=@site.zip \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THINHOST_API_KEY" \
  https://thin.host/v1/websites/my-site/archive

A single upload can be up to 30 MB. See the REST API reference for every field.

Add a custom domain

1. Open the site in the dashboard and add your hostname under Custom Domains, for example www.example.com. A <name>.thin.host subdomain is free and works immediately.
2. Create the DNS record the dashboard shows: a CNAME pointing at cname.thin.host. TLS is issued automatically once DNS resolves.
3. Rebuild with the base path / (npm run build) and redeploy.

Pages on a custom domain get a canonical tag, a generated robots.txt and a sitemap.xml.

Astro notes

• Static output is Astro's default. A project that added an SSR adapter or output: 'server' needs the default static output (or prerendered pages) to produce a folder thin.host can serve.
• Files in public/ referenced as /file.png are not prefixed with the base; build those URLs from import.meta.env.BASE_URL too.

FAQ

Sources

Commands and options checked against the official Astro docs on 2026-10-14:

• Astro: Deploy your Astro site
• Astro configuration reference: base
• Astro CLI reference
• Astro: Install and set up

Other frameworks: all deploy guides. Coming from another host? Compare thin.host.