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Bolt offers built-in hosting, so you can publish your Bolt project for free at a web address ending in bolt.host. You don’t need to set up a separate account with a third-party hosting service: just open the Publish menu to get started. When you publish, you choose whether your site is visible to everyone on the web (public) or only to your team and other people you invite (private). Private sites are useful for sharing in-progress work with specific collaborators or with your organization before it’s ready for public launch.
If you belong to a team, other members of your team can view your site by default, even if it’s private. Team admins can also set site visibility to private only or public only for all team projects. If your team has a global visibility setting, you’ll see it in the Publish menu.
If you’re on a paid plan and you’d rather use your own web address, you can attach a custom domain you own (like yoursite.com) or buy a domain through Bolt. Bolt also checks for security vulnerabilities each time you publish, so you can catch issues before they go live.
Always use the Publish or Update button in the Publish menu to publish your site, since these options don’t use tokens. Prompting Bolt to publish your project decreases your token balance.

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Publish your project as a publicly available site

Only the project owner or collaborators with Co-owner permissions can publish the project, update its visibility, and manage access. Collaborators and teammates can view the published site but can’t perform these actions themselves.
When your site is public, anyone on the web can view it and search engines can find and list it in search results. In the Publish menu, the default visibility is public. If you only want invited users to see your site, publish it as private instead. To publish your project as a public site:
Publish menu with visibility as public.
  1. In the top-right corner of your screen, click Publish.
  2. In the Publish your project menu, click Publish again.
  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 paid plan.

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Publish your project as a private site with restricted access

When your site is private, only your team and invited users can see it. It’s not generally accessible on the web, and search engines can’t find or list it in search results. Publishing a project as a private site lets you share it with collaborators while continuing to develop it for public launch.
Sites with a custom domain can only be published publicly. To publish privately, first disconnect the domain.
To publish your project as a private site:
  1. In the top-right corner of your screen, click Publish.
  2. In the Publish your project menu, change the visibility from Public to Private.
The Publish menu with the visibility dropdown set to Private.
  1. (Optional) Click Manage access to add collaborators or domain access to your site. If you’re not ready to add viewers yet, you can update your site later to manage who can see it.
  2. Wait about a minute for Bolt to deploy your site.
  3. Click the link that appears in the chat window to open your site in a new browser tab.

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Manage access for collaborators and trusted domains

You can invite individual collaborators using an email address or add a trusted domain so that any user whose email address belongs to a certain domain (for example, exampleco.com) can view your site. Adding a trusted domain reduces the effort when sharing openly within your company or organization.
If you’re on a team, you don’t have to invite your teammates individually. They have access to view your site by default.
To manage access to your private site:
1

Go to your site's access settings

  1. In the upper-right corner of your screen, in the Publish menu, make sure the site visibility is set to Private.
  2. Click Manage access.
2

Invite individual viewers

Enter the email address of each user you want to add, then click Invite.
Publish menu with visibility as private and invited collaborators.
3

Add trusted domains

  1. To the right of Trusted domains, click Manage.
  2. Enter any domain whose viewers should automatically get viewing access. For example, if you enter exampleco.com, any user whose address ends in @exampleco.com can see your site.
  3. Click Save domains.
Publish menu with trusted domain option and Save domains.
4

Publish your site

Do one of the following:
  • To publish your project for the first time, click Publish.
  • To update access to a previously published site, click Update.
You can see that you’ve added a trusted domain or invited individual viewers. You can also see that viewers who haven’t yet accepted your invitation show a Pending status, as shown in the screenshot below:

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Resend an invitation or remove a viewer

To resend an invitation or remove a viewer from your private site:
  1. In the upper-right corner of your screen, click Publish.
  2. Click Manage access.
  3. Next to the viewer you want to manage, click the three dots (…).
  4. Do one of the following:
    • To resend an invitation to a pending viewer, click Resend invite.
    • To remove a viewer’s access, click Remove.

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Review security

During publishing, Bolt automatically checks for security vulnerabilities. If Bolt finds any issues it alerts you and provides a Review security link, which takes you 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 Bolt doesn’t detect any vulnerabilities, or if you’ve already fixed them, the Publish menu shows the message No security issues.

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Change your bolt.host URL

The first time you publish your site, Bolt automatically creates a random bolt.host URL name for you.
Editing the domain URL in the Publish menu.
After publishing, you can change your bolt.host domain name by following these steps:
  1. In the Publish menu, to the right of your domain URL, click the Edit domain (pencil icon).
  2. Enter your new domain URL.
  3. If you want to immediately republish your site using the new domain URL, select Republish after updating.
  4. Click Save.

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Publish changes to your live site

After you publish, changes you make to your Bolt project aren’t automatically applied to your published site. This lets you continue working on your project and control when to make updates live. To publish changes, in the Publish menu, click Update.

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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.
The publish menu with the unpublish link highlighted.
  1. In the Publish menu, click Unpublish.
  2. Click Unpublish again to confirm.