Your editors
Sign in to your dashboard with their Alinea Cloud account
Alinea Cloud
Alinea Cloud is a hosted backend for the Alinea dashboard. It signs your editors in, stores uploaded media and commits published changes to your GitHub repository, so you don't need to run a database or an auth provider yourself.
Alinea Cloud
Checks who they are and which role they have
Your GitHub repo
Publishing commits the content to your branch as JSON
Your site
Picks up the new content, wherever you host it
What it does
Sign-in
Editors sign in to your dashboard with their Alinea Cloud account. You don’t need a login system of your own.
Users and roles
Invite editors from Alinea Cloud and give them one of the roles defined in your config.
Publishing
Publishing in the dashboard commits the changes to your GitHub repository.
Media
Files uploaded in the dashboard are stored by Alinea Cloud.
History
Look back at earlier versions of an entry in the dashboard.
No lock-in
Your content stays in your repository, so you can move to a self-hosted backend later without migrating it.
How to use it
Alinea Cloud connects to an existing Alinea project through a single environment variable.
1
Connect your repository
Deploy your site, open its dashboard and choose Continue with alinea.cloud. Connect GitHub and choose the repository your content lives in.
2
Add your API key
Set the API key Alinea Cloud gives you as an environment variable on your deployment and redeploy.
ALINEA_API_KEY=alineapk_…3
Invite your editors
Invite them from Alinea Cloud. They sign in on your dashboard with their own account.
Free while in beta
BetaAlinea Cloud is in beta and free to use while it is.
Questions
More details are in the Alinea Cloud docs.
Do I need Alinea Cloud to use Alinea?
No. Alinea only needs a Node.js environment and a git repository. For editors to sign in and publish on your deployed site you need a backend: you can run one yourself on your own database, or use Alinea Cloud.
Does Alinea Cloud host my website?
No. Your website and dashboard stay hosted by you, wherever you deploy them today. Alinea Cloud handles sign-in, users, media uploads and publishing to your GitHub repository.
What happens to my content if I stop using it?
Your published content lives in your own repository, so it stays yours. You can switch to running your own backend instead at any time.
Is Alinea Cloud used during local development?
No. When you run alinea dev, changes are saved to the files on your machine.