Drift — Canvas

Canvas

Static hosting with a same-origin API — no CORS, no ceremony.

Canvas serves your static files — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images — and forwards any request under /api/* to your Atomic functions. Your frontend and your backend live at the same origin, so the browser just calls /api/… with no CORS headers, no proxy config, and no separate API domain to manage.

This is Canvas's best trick: a React (or Vue, or plain-HTML) app deployed on Canvas calls /api/items as if it were a local file — same domain, same TLS, one deploy. The CORS problem simply doesn't exist.

Deploy a site

# serve a folder at the root
drift canvas deploy ./my-site

# mount a folder under a sub-path
drift canvas deploy ./admin --route /admin

Canvas zips the folder, uploads it, and serves it over HTTPS at your slice's URL — live immediately.

How routing works

Request	Served by
`GET /`	Canvas → `index.html`
`GET /styles.css`	Canvas → the static file
`GET /api/items`	Atomic → the `http=get:items` function
`POST /api/items`	Atomic → the `http=post:items` function

Anything under /api/ goes to your functions; everything else is served as a static file.

Single-page apps

Deploy your framework's build output (the contents of dist/ or build/) like any other folder. Canvas serves HTML with the right content types and injects a <base href> tag when one is missing, so your assets resolve correctly no matter which path the app is mounted at.

Multiple sites

A slice can host several sites, each at its own route. Deploy them with different --route values:

drift canvas deploy ./marketing             # at /
drift canvas deploy ./blog  --route /blog   # at /blog
drift canvas deploy ./admin --route /admin  # at /admin

In a Driftfile

Declare your sites alongside everything else and ship them with one command:

canvas:
  sites:
    - ./site                # mounted at /
    - dir: ./blog
      route: /blog          # mounted at /blog

A full-stack app — a frontend, an API, and its data — is just three sections of one file:

name: my-app
atomic:
  functions:
    - get-items
    - create-item
backbone:
  nosql:
    - items
canvas:
  sites:
    - ./frontend/build

drift project deploy

Your build is served at /, your functions answer at /api/*, and your data lives in Backbone — all on the same origin. See the Driftfile reference for every option.

Custom domains

Every slice answers at <username>-<slice>.ondrift.eu with TLS handled for you, and you can point your own hostname at it: drift slice domain add yoursite.com, add the DNS records it prints, then drift slice domain verify yoursite.com — Drift issues and renews the certificate. The Quick Start walks the full flow.