Show HN: Open-artifact – view and share your LLM docs and artifacts

Open Artifact is a new open-source tool that gives LLM-generated documents and artifacts a shareable URL, enabling private sharing, line-level commenting, and agent-driven revision. The project, hosted at open-artifact.com, allows users to self-host or use the free hosted instance, and supports publishing from coding agents via CLI or MCP endpoint.

Your coding agent writes a report, a design doc, a dashboard. Right now that lands as a file on your laptop that nobody else can see. Open Artifact gives it a URL. The agent publishes, you get a link, you share it with the people who need to read it. They comment on the exact paragraph they are reacting to, and the agent reads those comments back and revises. You host all of it yourself. Publish from the agent. One command, or the bundled skill so the agent does it without being asked. HTML and Markdown. HTML runs in a sandbox with no access to your session. Markdown is rendered with headings, tables and syntax highlighting. Share deliberately. Private by default. Open it to named people, to everyone at your email domain, or to anyone with the link. Comment on a specific line. Comments hold their position when the document is republished, and say so plainly when the text they pointed at is gone. Feedback loop. The agent reads the comments and publishes a new version. Don't want to run a server? The hosted instance is live and free: open-artifact.com . Sign up with your email, connect your assistant, and start publishing — nothing to deploy. Everything below this is for when you'd rather host your own. git clone https://github.com/iBala/open-artifact.git cd open-artifact pnpm install pnpm --filter @open-artifact/server dev Open http://localhost:3000 http://localhost:3000 . With no mail server configured, sign-in codes are printed to the terminal, so you can sign in and click around without setting up anything else. Everything you need is in deploy/ . cp deploy/env.example .env then fill in BASE URL, SESSION SECRET, SMTP docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yml up -d Two things to know before you go live: Put a reverse proxy in front of it. The container binds to localhost only, on purpose. Terminate TLS with Caddy, nginx or Traefik and forward to it. You need a mail server. Sign-in codes and share notifications go out over SMTP. Amazon SES, Postmark, Fastmail, your own — anything that speaks SMTP. Without it, nobody can sign in. Then prove the install works: ./deploy/smoke.sh https://artifacts.example.com That signs in, publishes, checks the sandbox headers are really being sent, shares, comments, republishes and confirms the comment kept its place. If it passes, the instance is good. SIGNUP MODE decides. invite-only is the default: an account is created only for someone an artifact was shared with. domain-allowlist opens it to listed email domains. open lets anyone in. Every setting is explained in deploy/env.example , and the server refuses to boot with a clear message if something is missing or contradictory. Two ways in, depending on whether the assistant has a terminal. Has a terminal Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and friends — hand your assistant one sentence and let it set itself up: Set up Open Artifact for me. Install the CLI — npm install -g open-artifact --registry https://registry.npmjs.org/ — then read https://open-artifact.com/setup.md and follow it. Every instance serves its own /setup.md , so swap in your own address when you self-host. That page walks the assistant through installing, signing you in, and saving the skill. The skill itself lives in skill/ . No terminal Claude on the web, ChatGPT — the hosted MCP endpoint. Add https://artifacts.example.com/mcp as a custom connector in the app's settings; the instance walks the connector through OAuth and shows a consent page. A connection can publish, update and share its own documents and read their comments — and deliberately cannot delete anything, make anything public, or read documents other people shared with you. MCP DESIGN.md has the reasoning. Header-capable tools can skip OAuth: mint a token under Settings → Sessions → "Connect an assistant" and send it as Authorization: Bearer … . | Folder | What it is | |---|---| packages/server | Hono API, SQLite via Drizzle, auth, sharing, comments | packages/web | React and Vite front end | packages/cli | The open-artifact command the agent runs | packages/shared | Types and validation both sides use | packages/e2e | Playwright tests against a real browser | skill/ | The agent instructions | deploy/ | Compose file, environment template, smoke test | The database is one SQLite file. Back that file up and you have backed up the whole instance. The compose file includes a nightly backup that uses SQLite's own .backup command, not a file copy, because copying a live database gives you a corrupt one. pnpm install pnpm test unit and integration pnpm lint pnpm typecheck pnpm --filter @open-artifact/e2e test browser tests Tests come first here. If you are adding behaviour, the test that describes it should exist before the code that satisfies it. Open an issue on GitHub: github.com/iBala/open-artifact/issues . Bug reports, feature requests and rough ideas are all welcome — that's where we track what to build next. Open Artifact is fair-code , under the Sustainable Use License /iBala/open-artifact/blob/main/LICENSE — the same licence n8n uses. You can self-host and modify it for free, including inside a company. You cannot sell it or run it as a commercial hosted service without a commercial licence. For that, or for an enterprise arrangement SSO/SAML, audit logs, dedicated hosting , email hello@open-artifact.com mailto:hello@open-artifact.com .