Getting Started

Everything you need to go from a fresh Launchpad account to your first live server.

Welcome aboard. You don't need to be technical to use Launchpad or these guides. Launchpad gives your app its own private server, a database and a web address, all looked after by us, and a connector so Claude Code in the Claude desktop app can build directly on it.

If you've already built something and just want it online, jump to Taking your app live.

This section covers the two things you do once:

Create your account and get your secret key.
Launch your first server.

After that, head to Connecting Claude Code. Most people are building within ten minutes of finishing these pages.

What Launchpad manages for you

You get	Handled by Launchpad
A dedicated Ubuntu server	Provisioning, patching, swap, nginx
A MySQL database	Installation, configuration, backups
A public address	`*.asklaunchpad.com` DNS and TLS
Access for you and Claude	Short-lived, scoped SSH certificates
Deploys and logs	Connector tools, no pipeline to set up

What you manage

Your app: what it does and what it looks like. Claude does the hands-on building; you describe, review and decide. If you are technical, the server is a normal Ubuntu machine and anything you know how to do on Linux works here too.

Next: Create your account