Bonsai Cloud

Introduction

Bonsai Cloud is managed hosting for landing pages and small sites. You point it at a GitHub repository and a domain; it creates everything needed to serve that site and wires up continuous deployment. There's no dashboard clicking and no infrastructure to babysit.

It handles the whole loop for you:

• The web app on tuned Nginx (native for static, hybrid for PHP)
• A database, provisioned automatically for Laravel & WordPress
• The DNS record (auto-created for Cloudflare-managed domains)
• A Let's Encrypt certificate, renewed automatically
• An auto-deploy webhook so every push goes live
• Instant, non-destructive rollback when you need it

Deploy to any of your servers by name. Static sites (plain HTML plus Astro, Vite, Eleventy, Hugo, Gatsby, SvelteKit, Next, Nuxt, Jekyll), PHP landers, Laravel and WordPress, and long-running Node services are all first-class.

Quickstart

From zero to a live, HTTPS site in three commands.

1. Install the CLI

npm install -g @bonsaicloud/cli

2. Connect your account

bonsai init stores your token and picks your default server and team. It's interactive and only needs to run once.

bonsai init
bonsai doctor   # verify connectivity

3. Deploy

bonsai deploy acme \
  --repo edgedigital/acme-lander \
  --domain acme.example.com

✓ Web app created
✓ DNS record created (acme.example.com → 77.42.25.95)
✓ Repo attached · webhook registered
✓ SSL issued (Let's Encrypt, dns-01)
✓ Deployment triggered

Done. acme → https://acme.example.com  ·  ~50s

That's it — the site is live over HTTPS, and every push to the branch redeploys it. Run it from inside the repo and the preset is auto-detected; you can omit the name too.

The deploy command

bonsai deploy <name> --repo <owner/repo> --domain <fqdn> [options]

A single deploy runs the full provisioning sequence:

1. Creates the web app on your server
2. Grants the deploy user read access to the repo
3. Attaches the repo and registers the push webhook
4. Adds the domain and requests a certificate
5. Triggers the first deployment
6. Writes a bonsai.json to the repo so later commands know the target

Options

Presets

A preset tells Bonsai how to build (if at all) and which directory to serve. It's auto-detected from your repo; pass --preset to be explicit.

Servers

Bonsai deploys across all of your servers. Register each one once, then target it by a short alias on any deploy.

bonsai server add overpass   # pick the server + user interactively
bonsai server ls             # list configured servers (* = default)
bonsai server use overpass   # set the default target
bonsai deploy acme --repo edge/acme --domain acme.co --server atlas

Omit --server and the deploy goes to your default. Every site remembers which server it lives on, so logs, redeploy, rollback, and rm always act on the right one.

Frameworks & apps

Beyond static sites and PHP landers, Bonsai provisions database-backed frameworks and long-running apps.

Laravel

Bonsai creates the web app on a hybrid stack, provisions a dedicated database and user, and sets a deploy script that runs composer install, artisan migrate, and the config caches. It prints the database credentials for your one-time server-side .env, then you deploy for real:

bonsai deploy shop --repo edge/shop --domain shop.co --preset laravel
# → add the printed DB creds + APP_KEY to .env on the server, then:
bonsai redeploy shop

WordPress

WordPress uses a native install that provisions the site and its database for you. Bonsai asks for the site title and admin details, generates the admin password, and requests SSL — no repo needed.

bonsai deploy blog --domain blog.co --preset wordpress

Node services

Run long-running Node apps — SSR servers (Next, Nuxt), Express APIs, anything that listens on a port. Bonsai builds the app, then keeps the process alive under a supervisor with auto-restart.

bonsai deploy api --repo edge/api --domain api.co --preset node --start server.js

The build seeds a port into .env; add any other environment there and reload the process to pick it up:

bonsai restart api    # reload after a new build or an .env change

Domains & SSL

Pass any domain to --domain. For domains on a connected Cloudflare account, Bonsai creates the DNS record for you and issues the certificate via DNS-01 validation — no manual steps. For other providers, point an A record at your server first; Bonsai checks that it resolves before requesting the certificate.

Certificates are Let's Encrypt and renew automatically. HTTPS is typically live within a minute of deploying.

Auto-deploy & rollback

After the first deploy, the push webhook is live: every push to the branch builds and goes live automatically. No dashboards, no manual redeploys.

Shipped something you'd like to undo? Roll back to any previous commit — non-destructively (a new commit restores the old content, so history is preserved):

bonsai rollback acme            # pick from recent commits
bonsai rollback acme --to 85e6c46   # or target a specific commit

Roll "forward" again with a normal push.

CLI reference

Commands that take [name] default to the bonsai.json in the current directory, so inside a repo you can just run bonsai redeploy.

Configuration

Config lives in ~/.bonsai/config.json (written by bonsai init). Every value can be overridden with an environment variable — handy for CI:

FAQ