Artefactor

Artefactor hosts and serves trusted HTML artefacts produced by claude.ai and Claude design — UX/UI prototypes, slide decks, forms, and interactive documents — and gives them server-side persistence for free by transparently hijacking localStorage.

Upload a self-contained HTML file (or push one from Claude over the MCP connector), share it privately, with signed-in users, or publicly by link, and any data the artefact saves is persisted per-user on the backend with no changes to the artefact's code.

Status

Usable, still pre-1.0. Hosting and sharing, collections, per-user artefact data, the MCP connector and card thumbnails are in place; artefacts are served in a sandboxed frame. What is built, in progress or still specced lives in the slice DAG — docs/specs/fdd/slice-dag.md and the context files it catalogues — which is the single, test-enforced source of truth for status.

Highlights

• Trusted-HTML hosting with three visibility tiers: private, authenticated (any signed-in user), and public (anyone with the link).
• Zero-change persistence — Artefactor replaces localStorage with a backend-backed, per-user store, seeded server-side so reads stay synchronous. Artefacts just use the standard localStorage API.
• Two ingestion paths — manual upload and the MCP connector (OAuth-authenticated, so Claude publishes and updates artefacts directly) — enforcing identical domain invariants.
• Collections — an owner-only nestable folder tree whose root's access the artefacts inside it inherit, with per-user bookmarks and an archive that cascades.
• Card thumbnails — a rendered preview per artefact for the dashboard and gallery, produced by an isolated renderer container that runs the uploader's JavaScript far from the app.
• Single deployable monolith — one Hono process serves the API and the Svelte SPA.

Tech stack

Layer	Choice
Backend / BFF	Hono on Node
Frontend	Svelte 5 (Vite SPA)
Design system	shadcn-svelte + Tailwind CSS v4
ORM / DB	Drizzle over SQLite (better-sqlite3)
Auth	BetterAuth (Google OAuth in production; email+password in dev/test only)
Deploy	Docker monolith on a Coolify-managed VPS

How it's built

Development is spec-driven:

• DDD (Domain-Driven Design) defines the model — aggregates, invariants, business logic.
• FDD (Feature-Driven Design) slices that model into a dependency DAG; slices are built in topological order.
• TDD — every slice is built test-first; spec, tests, and implementation are kept in sync.

The specs are the source of truth and live in docs/specs/. Start with docs/specs/README.md.

Quick start

Requires Node 26.4.0 (pinned in .nvmrc) and pnpm 11+. Use that version for every command: better-sqlite3 is a native addon compiled from source against the Node you install with, and a different Node then refuses to load it (ABI mismatch).

pnpm install
pnpm approve-builds --all     # compile better-sqlite3 (native; pnpm blocks build scripts by default)
pnpm db:migrate               # create the SQLite schema
pnpm dev                      # Vite (5173) + Hono (3000); open http://localhost:5173

Other commands:

pnpm test                     # unit tests (Vitest)
pnpm check                    # type-check (svelte-check + tsc)
pnpm build && pnpm start      # production build, then run the bundled server

Project layout

src/
  domain/     pure domain model — aggregates, invariants, ports (no framework imports)
  infra/      adapters: Drizzle/SQLite (db/), filesystem payload store (storage/), rendering (render/)
  server/     Hono BFF — composition root, env, routes, artefact serving, MCP connector
  renderer/   the isolated thumbnail renderer — a separate role from the same image
  client/     Svelte SPA + Tailwind + shadcn-svelte components
  shared/     contracts shared between the BFF and the client
deploy/       Compose example, seccomp profile and egress rules for the two-container deployment
docs/specs/   DDD + FDD specifications (source of truth)
skills/       Agent Skill teaching Claude to author artefacts that persist correctly

Docker

docker build -t artefactor .
docker run -p 3000:3000 -v artefactor-data:/data artefactor

The image runs migrations on boot and serves on :3000. Mount a volume at /data — it holds the SQLite database, the artefact payloads and their thumbnails (the entire state of the monolith). The image declares no VOLUME, so the mount is yours to name.

Card thumbnails are rendered by a second container from the same image (ARTEFACTOR_ROLE=renderer): it screenshots artefact HTML in sandboxed Chromium, holds no secrets or storage, and is thrown away after every job. Run the pair with deploy/docker-compose.example.yml and read docs/renderer-isolation.md first — it is a security boundary, not a convenience. Without ARTEFACTOR_RENDERER_URL the app never renders anything and cards show a kind placeholder.

License

MIT © Hidden Value AB