Deployment

@norbital-ai/bolt is the authoring SDK and runtime. Deploying a workspace means getting its source built, its database provisioned, and its bundle served. Colony is the host that does all of this for you.

Colony (self-hostable)

Colony operates the full workspace lifecycle for each organization:

Workspace Studio — primary authoring and release surface ( docs )
Validated temporary builds — explicit Preview and release operations run migration generation, lint, typecheck, repository health, and bundle compilation in a temporary materialized tree with the workspace-pinned Bolt and Vite toolchain; this is a lifecycle boundary, not a security sandbox
Release artifacts — an immutable artifact per release, keyed by checksum, with workbench preview and Live environments, governed release paths, and rollback to the previous three releases
Per-tenant databases — Postgres provisioned per org, with one autosuspending disposable fork for an active Preview
Agent — in-workspace AI assistant ( docs )
Source store, auth, billing, and multi-tenant operations

Pro / Standard licensing plus metered cloud and AI usage. Enterprise adds a forward-deployed Norbital engineer.

Host-agnostic by design

Bolt declares its dependencies as facility ports — Postgres, object storage, and an ai provider — rather than hard-wiring them. Colony is the reference host that implements those ports. The same workspace source is portable because only the host bindings change, never the application code.

How a deploy works on Colony

The primary path is Workspace Studio — contributors edit their identity-owned source through Studio rather than managing branches or deployment infrastructure.

You edit workspace source in your one personal Workspace Studio workbench.
Preview generates editable DDL, runs every static gate, builds the artifact, and provisions one disposable database fork.
Approval verifies the exact reviewed Preview against current Live , applies its exact schema plan, and fast-forwards the Live release.
If any step fails, the previous release keeps serving — deploys never break live operations.

See Workspace Studio for the release actions in detail, and Colony platform for what a release artifact carries.