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What Chandlery is, what you need, and the order to do things in.
Chandlery is a complete, working web application that you own. It already has accounts and sign-in, a database, an admin-ready structure, tests, and a route to putting it online. Nothing in it is a demo stub.
You do not need to know how to code. You need an AI coding assistant — Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex — and the willingness to read what it tells you. Your job is to decide what the product should do. Its job is to write the code.
What you need before you start
- A computer running macOS, Windows, or Linux
- An AI coding assistant
- A free Cloudflare account — it does not ask for a card until you need the paid features
- About 30 minutes for the first two stages
The order to do things in
Six stages, in order. Each one assumes the one before it worked.
| Stage | You end up with |
|---|---|
| Install the tools | Node, pnpm and git working on your computer |
| Run it locally | The site open in your browser, with your own account on it |
| Make it yours | A home page that explains your product |
| Add what it does | The thing you actually wanted to build |
| Put it online | A real URL you can send to somebody |
| Go live | Your own domain, serving real users |
The one rule
When something goes wrong, do not guess and do not start deleting things. Paste the entire error — all of it, including the boring parts — to your assistant, and say what you were doing. It can read this project and almost always knows the fix.
There is also a checkup command. Ask your assistant:
Run the project checkup and tell me in plain language what is wrong and what to do about it.
Two files you can ignore
AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md in the project folder are written for your AI
assistant, not for you. They contain the same text; your assistant reads
whichever one it knows about. You never need to open either.