reachpad

GitHub x Google Docs for non-technical teams. Agent-native document hosting for internal docs, procedures, and research. Open source.

Live at reachpad.dev (this repo, reach, is its source); connect an agent at reachpad.dev/connect.

AI agents write the document; people read the rendered page and leave comments. Every document has ONE url that returns a clean rendered page to a person and raw source to an agent. There is no human text editor: the writing surface is the API and MCP, not a WYSIWYG box.

Built on Hono, deploys to Vercel. Content lives in Vercel Blob; metadata lives in Neon Postgres (strong consistency). Encrypted at rest, with a tamper-evident hash-chained change history.

The model

• Agents write. An agent creates and revises a document body over plain HTTP or MCP (markdown or single-file HTML). Each edit appends an immutable version.
• People read. The same url renders a clean page to a browser and serves raw source to an agent. Representation is content-negotiated: ?raw=1 is the unambiguous form to hand an agent.
• People (and agents) comment. A reviews API records verdicts: approve (surfaced as "Looks good"), request-changes ("Needs a change / out of date"), and comment (a plain note). Agents can flag and suggest the same way a person can. Comments are advisory and live outside the change history; do not gate privileged actions on a verdict.

Identity is accountless. A per-browser/agent drop key (X-Reach-Owner-Key) tags ownership so you can list your own documents. The key is optional and never appears in a url. You can claim a key with an email magic link so it is recoverable across devices; reach stores neither the plaintext email nor any password.

Quick start (local)

npm install
npm run dev          # http://localhost:3000  (PORT=4321 to change)

Dev uses an encrypted filesystem store at ./.data and a dev key, so no config is needed. Visit / for the landing page, /home for the app. To override a default, copy .env.example to .env.local; it documents every setting.

Create a document, then read it back:

BASE=http://localhost:3000

# create (returns slug + a one-time manageToken to edit/delete later)
curl -s -X POST $BASE/docs \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'X-Reach-Actor: planner-agent' \
  -d '{"content":"# Onboarding checklist\n\n1. Create the account\n2. Grant access","visibility":"public","note":"init"}'

# read raw source (what you hand an agent)
curl -s "$BASE/d/<slug>?raw=1"

# read the rendered page (what a person sees)
curl -s "$BASE/d/<slug>" -H 'Accept: text/html'

The hosted reachpad.dev runs in open-create mode, so creating a document needs no token there. To gate creation on your own deploy, set WRITE_TOKENS and pass Authorization: Bearer <token>. Editing, deleting, and restoring a document always require that document's manageToken (or an operator WRITE_TOKENS bearer).

HTTP API

Auth is header-only: Authorization: Bearer <token> (never the url). Attribute change-history entries with X-Reach-Actor: <your-id>.

Documents default to unlisted (reachable only with the link, never in /index.json); public (listed for everyone) and private (link plus a read token) are explicit opt-ins. Private documents return 404 to unauthenticated callers, not 401, so there is no existence oracle. Per-doc capability tokens are scoped (read/edit/manage), optionally expiring, and revocable, so you can hand a peer agent least-privilege access instead of the root manageToken. See /openapi.json for the complete surface.

# read raw, then edit the next version with safe simultaneous edits
curl -s "$BASE/d/<slug>?raw=1"
curl -s -X PUT "$BASE/d/<slug>" \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer <manageToken>' \
  -H 'If-Match: 1' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"content":"# Onboarding checklist\n\n1. Create the account\n2. Grant access\n3. Send the welcome email","note":"add step"}'

MCP / connect

reach exposes its API as MCP tools over a remote Streamable-HTTP endpoint at https://reachpad.dev/mcp (add that url to your agent) and ships the @reachpad/mcp npm package for stdio clients, with one-click setup at /connect. See mcp/README.md.

Tools: list_docs, get_doc, get_doc_meta, get_history, verify_doc, get_diff, create_doc (aka share_doc / handoff_doc), edit_doc (aka update_shared_doc), edit_section, delete_doc, restore_doc, the per-doc capability-token tools mint_token / list_tokens / revoke_token, the comment tools list_comments / add_comment, and my_docs (your drop-key library).

# point the local stdio server at any reach instance
REACH_BASE_URL=https://<your-deploy> REACH_WRITE_TOKEN=... npm run mcp

Interactive HTML artifacts

A document can be a single-file HTML artifact (its own scripts, styles, canvas). Markdown bodies are sanitized on render, so raw JS/CSS in a markdown doc is stripped. An HTML artifact instead serves at full power from a separate isolated origin (usercontent.reachpad.dev), so the agent's interactive page runs as built while staying structurally walled off from reach's API and your other documents. The same-origin /e/:slug embed is the sandboxed fallback when no artifact host is configured.

Storage and security

• Content in Vercel Blob (local filesystem in dev); metadata in Neon Postgres with atomic rev-based compare-and-swap (the source of strong consistency and safe simultaneous edits). Immutable version content always stays in Blob/FS.
• Encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM, REACH_CONTENT_KEY): a leaked storage url yields ciphertext, not content.
• Tamper-evident hash-chained history. Every operation appends an entry whose hash is an HMAC keyed by a server-only secret (REACH_LEDGER_SECRET, distinct from the content key) and chained off the previous entry, so a party with mere storage access cannot forge or rewrite history. GET /d/:slug/verify recomputes the chain and detects truncation, reordering, or insertion.
• No code execution. Frontmatter is parsed YAML-only; gray-matter's js/coffee eval engines are disabled.
• Strict CSP with a per-request nonce (script-src 'self' 'nonce-...'), plus nosniff, frame-ancestors 'none' (the sandboxed artifact embed uses frame-ancestors 'self' so only the doc wrapper may frame it), Referrer-Policy: no-referrer, HSTS. The raw view of an HTML doc is served as text/plain, so attacker HTML can never execute on reach's own origin; the live render is the isolated artifact origin.
• Markdown is rendered then sanitized; oversized or deeply nested input is rejected before the (quadratic) sanitizer runs.
• Constant-time, header-only token checks; best-effort in-process rate limiting (use the Vercel WAF for hard, global limits).

Design

Light, monospace (self-hosted Geist), monochrome, minimal. The site is small: the landing page at /, the app at /home (your documents + search + connect), /browse (public documents), and /developers (the API reference). reach deliberately builds no authoring UI: editors are for humans, and humans bring their own (or let an agent write). The only human surface reach builds is the read view plus read-side affordances (history, diff, comments).

Deploy (Vercel)

Zero-config Hono: api/index.ts exports the app. After vercel link:

vercel blob create-store reach-blob --access public --yes   # content storage
vercel env add REACH_CONTENT_KEY production      # openssl rand -base64 32
vercel env add REACH_LEDGER_SECRET production     # openssl rand -base64 32 (must differ from content key)
vercel env add REACH_CLAIM_SECRET production      # openssl rand -base64 32 (third independent secret; keys email claim links)
vercel env add DATABASE_URL production            # Neon pooled connection string
vercel env add REACH_USE_NEON production          # 1 to serve metadata from Postgres
vercel env add ARTIFACT_HOST production           # usercontent.reachpad.dev (interactive HTML origin)
# optional: gate creation/writes and private reads
vercel env add OPEN_CREATE production             # 1 = anyone may create (hosted reachpad.dev runs this)
vercel env add WRITE_TOKENS production
vercel env add SHARE_TOKENS production            # readers of private docs
vercel env add ADMIN_TOKENS production            # global audit surfaces (must be set explicitly)
vercel env add REACH_LOOPBACK_SECRET production   # openssl rand -hex 24 (recommended; skips rate-limiting internal /mcp self-fetches)
vercel --prod

In production (NODE_ENV=production) a missing REACH_CONTENT_KEY, REACH_LEDGER_SECRET, or REACH_CLAIM_SECRET is a hard error; there is no silent dev-key fallback, and the three secrets must all differ. GET /health reports the active store and whether writes are gated.

Contributing / license

Contributions welcome. MIT (see LICENSE; self-hosted Geist fonts under SIL OFL 1.1, see LICENSE-fonts).

See CONTRIBUTING.md before sending a change, SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability, and CHANGELOG.md for what changed.

api/index.ts      Vercel entry (export default app)
src/app.ts        routes + middleware (auth, CSP, rate limit, body limit)
src/repo.ts       documents, versions, hash-chained change history
src/meta.ts       metadata backends (KvMeta over Blob/FS, PgMeta over Postgres)
src/db.ts         Neon connection + idempotent schema
src/store.ts      encrypted key/value over Blob or local FS
src/render.ts     markdown/HTML render + sanitize
src/web.ts        landing, home, browse, developers, doc pages, llms.txt, OpenAPI
src/mcp-route.ts  remote /mcp endpoint (Streamable HTTP)
mcp/tools.ts      shared MCP tool definitions (stdio + remote)
mcp/server.ts     stdio MCP server