Hosting: Publish your project

Publish your project to a free bolt.host web address.

Every project created in Bolt is eligible for free bolt.host publishing with no setup required. This means you can publish your site publicly without the hassle of connecting to a third-party hosting application.

To learn more about Bolt hosting features and limits, see Plans.

Publishing vs. sharing

Sharing vs. publishing

Bolt also lets you share a working prototype of your app without exposing your full project. You can generate a private link so others can explore your app in a hosted environment, while your files and code stay safely inside Bolt. This is called sharing (private) rather than publishing (public).

Sharing is available on paid plans, and people who use your shared link can only access the live preview: they do not get edit access to the project itself.

Option	Who can access	Visibility	Best use
Sharing	Invited viewers only	Not indexed or public	Private reviews and testing
Publishing	Anyone on the web	Discoverable by search engines	Public launch or open access

To learn more about sharing instead of publishing, see the Sharing Documentation.

How to publish your project

To publish your project, follow the steps below:

1. Click Publish in the top-right corner of your screen.
2. Click the second Publish button that appears.
3. Wait about a minute for Bolt to deploy your site.
4. Click the link that appears in the chat window to open your site in a new browser tab.
5. (Optional) Attach a custom domain if you’re on a Pro plan.

Publishing your site using the Publish button does not use tokens, whereas prompting Bolt to publish your site may.

Review security when publishing

Bolt automatically checks for security vulnerabilities when you publish your site. If any issues are found, Bolt alerts you and provides a link to the Security Audit section in your Project Settings. From there, you can click the Ask Bolt to fix button to resolve issues automatically.

If no vulnerabilities are detected or if they have already been fixed, you will see a message in the Publish menu that says: No security issues.

Change your bolt.host URL

When you first publish your app, Bolt automatically creates a random bolt.host URL name for you.

You can change that domain name after the initial publish by following these steps:

1. Click Publish in the top-right corner of your screen.
2. Click the pencil icon next to your published domain URL.
3. Make your changes in the window that appears.
4. Decide whether to republish after updating using the checkbox.
5. Click Save.

Unpublish your Bolt-hosted site

If you need to take your site offline, and you published it with Bolt hosting, follow the steps in this section to unpublish your project safely.

Before you begin, check whether your project is using a custom domain. If so, you have to disconnect the custom domain before you unpublish your site. After the site is unpublished, you can reconnect the domain at any time if you decide to publish again.

1. In the Publish menu, click Unpublish.
2. Click Unpublish again to confirm.