Hello, world in the cloud

Deploy your first stack to the hosted service — no local runtime. You sign in, pull a published package, deploy it, and get a public URL back. About two minutes.

Everything here runs on Thanks, Computer, the hosted service. The txco CLI on your machine is the remote control: it signs you in, pulls a package, and pushes it to your cloud tenant. Nothing executes locally — there’s no txco serve, no chassis to run.

Note

Cloud or local? This tutorial uses our hosted chassis — it has a free tier, needs no setup, and gives your stack a public URL. To run the very same stack on your own machine instead, skip txco login and use txco dev: it boots a self-contained local chassis, applies your OPS/, and serves the stack at a printed http://hello-<rand>.localhost:8099. Same package, same rules — just no account and a local URL.

1. Install the CLI

brew tap loremlabs/txco && brew install txco

curl -fsSL https://get.thanks.computer/install.sh | bash

txco login

Your browser opens to sign in. The first time, you pick a tenant slug — your workspace handle in the cloud — and the service provisions it and enrolls a signing key on this machine. From now on, txco commands target your cloud tenant.

3. Pull a published package

A package is a shareable stack: a tree of rules, versioned and published to a registry. We’ll pull hello-world — a single rule that returns a JSON greeting.

mkdir hello && cd hello
txco install hello-world --as hello

  ✔ verified: signed by txco [SHA256:Zzh39Nrs…]
installed hello-world 0.1.1 as stack "hello" (1 file)

Review OPS/hello/, then run `txco apply` to deploy.

The ✔ verified line means the package’s signature checked out — the CLI fetched the registry’s signing key automatically (from its .well-known), so there’s nothing for you to configure. Install then materializes and stops: it writes plain, reviewable text into your workspace and never touches the cloud. Rules are text, not a black box — read what you’re about to run:

cat OPS/hello/100/hello.txcl

WHEN @src == "http"
  EMIT .say = "hello world"

Fire on any web request (@src == "http") and set .say. The web inlet returns the envelope as JSON (its default projection — every key except _-prefixed internals), so the response is {"say":"hello world"}. No external services to wire — it deploys as-is.

4. Deploy to the cloud

txco apply

apply pushes the stack to your tenant and activates it, then prints the public URL the service minted:

hello v1 activated (1 files)
  → https://hello-a1b2c3.stacks.thanks.computer

5. Visit it

curl https://hello-a1b2c3.stacks.thanks.computer

{
  "say": "hello world"
}

Open it in a browser too — it’s live on the public internet, served from your cloud tenant.

Change it

Edit the rule and ship again — the same one command:

# edit OPS/hello/100/hello.txcl …
txco apply

Each apply is a new version; the URL stays the same.

What you just did

You deployed a stack to the hosted service without running anything locally — sign in, pull a package, apply, done. The CLI held your files; the runtime was ours. From here:

Packages — pull other published stacks, or bundle and publish your own.
CLI reference — txco login, cloud, profiles, and the rest.
More tutorials are coming — real ingress, AI as an operation, and a human in the loop.