Building a website is easy now. Putting one online is not. The web has landlords now, and the deal is the old one: you make the thing, they keep it, and you pay to reach it. Relay is the last mile — static hosting, an easy database, reachability, and opt-in login and stats — so the thing you made can actually be seen.
Let's say you made something. An afternoon's work, maybe less. And now it sits in a folder — untracked, unbacked-up, seen by no one. Loved, and effectively indeployable by a normal person.
Even the ones served from home are invisible: behind a router, behind NAT, on a dynamic IP, on a machine nobody can reach.
The web has been captured. What began as a decentralized commons became five websites owned by five companies, all hosted on three clouds — the plague of landlords, now digital.
Making things got easy. Shipping them never did.
A folder is not a website.
It's a draft. Relay gives it an address.
Point Relay at a folder and it gets an address. No build step, no server to babysit, no database to provision before page one. Files are light — which is why one cheap machine can hold thousands of them.
Thousands of sites · one machineYour site remembers. One uniform store, on every server. Export the file and it travels: data that moves is data that lives.
Portable · yours to carryAn outbound connection to a public friend. No port forwarding, no static IP, no dynamic DNS. It fronts a folder you point it at — or the server you already run. The world comes in through the wire you opened.
NAT is not a wallTurn it on and your site's users live in your site's own database — sign-up, sign-in, sessions — with no Relay account anywhere. Export the site and its people come with it.
Your node already served every request. It can show you views, referrers, and top pages — first-party, cookieless, aggregate, and yours alone. No tracker follows your visitors.
The friend nodes dial out to the public node — one WebSocket each — so no port forwarding is ever needed. The public node keeps the list, routes each request to the right friend by its path prefix, and the answer travels back up the same wire. The same wire fronts a folder of files or an app you already run — so it is also a tunnel service you own. A boring trick with a boring name; it is the reason the computer under your desk can be a web server.
Anyone can publish, within the server's published rules. Personal sites, community pages, and experiments live here.
The owner issues a token; only sites bearing it can deploy. Families, clubs, and small businesses get a space gated by trust, not by somebody's account system.
The first time you deploy a name, Relay hands you a key — a small text file. That key is the deed. Update, move, or leave: the name stays yours. No landlord can claim your domain, overwrite your files, or impersonate your site. There is no password reset and no support ticket. That's the deal, and it's a good one.
What a server will and won't host is published, and checked by small local classifier models. Compliant sites deploy themselves. The rest wait for a human, not a platform.
Backend functions, sandboxed in a tiny QuickJS engine and rate-limited per site. A few hundred nodes lending spare cycles become a backend nobody owns. We already built the wire — compute is the next thing we send down it.
Everything below works right now, on this node — no central account, no sign-up, no permission slip. A folder becomes a website, one command installs a node, and the admin page hands out the keys.
Ask the operator for a deploy key — or issue one yourself on the admin page. Tar your folder, upload it, and the site goes live at /<node>/<site>/.
tar -C ./site-folder -cf site.tar . curl -X POST \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $RELAY_DEPLOY_TOKEN" \ -H "Content-Type: application/x-tar" \ --data-binary @site.tar \ "$RELAY_ORIGIN/_relay/v1/sites/docs/deploy"
$RELAY_ORIGIN is this node's address · $RELAY_DEPLOY_TOKEN is your deploy key
Relay is one binary. Install it, then start a node — the same code runs public or private, at home or in a cluster.
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSfL \ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nemoNoboru/relay/main/install.sh | sh relay node --data /var/lib/relay --listen :8080Binary · Docker · Swarm · Kubernetes
The node prints an admin token on first start. It unlocks the operator console — issue and revoke deploy keys, list sites, and roll a deploy back.
Admin console at /_relay/admin.htmlOf the web · by the web · for the web