Deploy a server-rendered Astro site from your AI agent, over MCP

Prerequisites

• An Astro site that renders pages on demand: your agent adds the Node adapter if it’s missing.
• An AI agent that works in a terminal: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or Gemini CLI.

Step 1: Give your agent these instructions

Open your agent in your site’s folder, and paste these instructions into it:

Connect to while with my account (while.sh/agents), then deploy my app.

Without an account, your agent deploys your site as a trial, in one request. To keep it, open the link it gives you and create your account.

With your account, your agent adds while’s MCP server itself. If it asks you to, restart it. On the first call to while, a page opens in your browser. In Claude Code, if it doesn’t open, type /mcp, choose while, then Authenticate. On that page, choose your app, or “A new app”, then click Authorize.

Step 2: Open your site

Your agent gives you your site’s address, for example https://mon-site.while.cloud, over HTTPS.

What your agent does

It writes while.yaml at the root of your site:

apiVersion: while/v1
project: mon-site
services:
  - name: web
    port: 4321
    health:
      path: /
    env:
      HOST: 0.0.0.0

Your site is built, then started by Astro’s standalone server, which reads HOST and the port it receives in PORT¹. Your agent also checks that the start script in your package.json runs node ./dist/server/entry.mjs, and not the development server.

Restrict your site to your colleagues

Your agent adds two lines to the service:

    access: internal
    email_domains: [acme.com]

Once your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is linked to while, on the Pro plan, your colleagues open it with their usual account, and your code receives their name and email address, with no sign-in page to write.

Share with a customer, protected by a password

Your agent makes the app private, then, on the app’s page in while, you create a link valid for 1, 7 or 30 days, with a password your agent will never see.

Move to your own domain

Your agent declares the domain, you add the DNS records it gives you, and the HTTPS certificate follows.

See a new version before you deploy it

Your agent opens a preview, at its own address, with its own data. You look at it, then your agent puts it into production.

Go back to the previous version

In the 30 minutes after a deployment, the previous version comes back in a second. After that, it takes a few seconds. Once the previous version is back, your agent reads what broke in while’s logs, fixes it and deploys again.

In the docs: Internal access, Custom domain, Previews and Versions and rollback.

Next steps

• Deploy a static site
• Deploy a SvelteKit app
• Put your app on your own domain