Top Banana

Describe an idea. Get a live, hosted website in about a minute.

Top Banana is a "vibe coding" hosting platform: you write a paragraph in plain English, an LLM agent builds a self-contained static site, and it goes live on its own subdomain — no code editor, no build step, no hosting to set up.

The gap between "I have an idea" and "I have a URL I can send to a friend" should be a minute, not an afternoon. Top Banana is built for the people who live in that gap — hobbyists, small-business owners, event organizers, club leaders, instructors — and for developers who want a fast sketchpad for static sites. You describe it; you get a real site; you share its address.

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Describe it, then watch it build

Type what you want and pick a starter template. The agent writes the HTML, inlines the CSS and JS, lints the result, and streams its progress live — you watch the build move from Starting → Designing → Polishing → Ready instead of staring at a spinner.

Real sites, instantly hosted

The generated site is the demo. Every build lands on its own subdomain, served straight from object storage, fully self-contained — no CDNs, no frameworks, no external dependencies. A book club, a bistro, a portfolio, a link-in-bio page — same prompt-to-URL path, wildly different results.

Edit without writing code

A site is never a dead end. The Workspace pairs your pages with a live preview and an "ask for a change" box — describe an edit and the agent makes it. Theme Studio restyles the whole site with one click across 30+ themes.

Manage everything in one place

Your apps list shows everything you've built, last-edited at a glance. Each site opens on three tabs: Edit to change it, Inbox for whatever visitors sent (form submissions you can download as CSV or JSON, plus the photo-wall queue), and Settings for custom domains with copy-paste DNS, a private toggle, exports, and a completeness checklist.

Run it as a platform

Top Banana is multi-tenant from the ground up: passkey sign-in, per-user app quotas, one-time invite links, and a super-admin Admin section — People for accounts and invites, Connections for MCP clients, and Instance for storage, build success rates, and recent activity.

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How it works

1. Submit a prompt (and optionally a starter template + reference docs).
2. An LLM agent generates .html files — CSS and JS inlined — using S3-backed write_file / read_file / list_files tools.
3. The site is hosted immediately at {slug}.{domain} via subdomain routing.
4. Build progress streams live over Server-Sent Events.
5. Generated CSS is compiled per-site with a self-hosted Tailwind + daisyUI pipeline — no CDN tags ever ship.

Architecture

• Subdomain routing — requests to *.localhost (or your configured domain) are proxied to the S3 prefix matching the subdomain slug.
• Agentic builder — an LLM agent with file tools, lint/retry, and a CSS compile step, orchestrated via Google ADK.
• S3 storage — AWS S3 SDK v2 with path-style addressing; Minio for local dev. A site "exists" if it has objects under its slug prefix.
• Passkey auth — WebAuthn sign-in, S3-backed sessions, invites, and per-user quotas.
• HTML linting — validates generated HTML and relative links after each build.

Prerequisites

• Go 1.21+
• Task
• Minio (local S3-compatible storage)
• The Tailwind standalone CLI (tailwindcss on PATH, or npx @tailwindcss/cli) for the per-site CSS compile
• An LLM provider — defaults to LM Studio at http://localhost:1234/v1

Quick Start

# Start Minio and run the server against LM Studio
task local

The server starts on port 8080. The first time, enroll the super admin (see below) — after that you land on the build form and can start shipping sites.

First-run: enrolling the super admin

Authentication is passkey-based — there is no admin password. On every startup the server seeds a user record for --super-admin-email (defaults to admin@local in task local) and issues a one-shot bootstrap invite the first time that account has no registered credentials. The invite URL is logged as:

auth.bootstrap.invite_pending email=admin@local url=https://lvh.me/register?invite=<token> expires=...

For local HTTP dev, rewrite the scheme and add the port — turn that into http://lvh.me:8080/register?invite=<token> and open it in a browser. The /register page binds a passkey to the super-admin account; subsequent visits to /login use that passkey. The invite is reused on every restart until you finish enrolling, then it stops appearing in the logs.

If you ever lose the passkey, delete the user from Minio (rm -rf /tmp/topbanana-minio/topbanana/_auth/users/) and restart — bootstrap fires again.

Configuration

All options are available as CLI flags or environment variables.

Flag	Env Var	Default	Description
--port	PORT	8080	HTTP listen port
--domain	DOMAIN	localhost	Base domain for subdomain routing
--super-admin-email	SUPER_ADMIN_EMAIL	(required)	Email of the seeded super admin; bootstrap invite is logged at startup until enrolled
--insecure-cookies	INSECURE_COOKIES	off	Allow non-Secure cookies; required for the session flow over plain HTTP locally
--s3-bucket	S3_BUCKET	(required)	S3 bucket name
--s3-endpoint-url	AWS_ENDPOINT_URL		Override S3 endpoint (e.g. Minio)
--llm-model	LLM_MODEL		LLM model string
--llm-base-url	LLM_BASE_URL		LLM provider base URL
--llm-api-key	LLM_API_KEY		LLM provider API key
--tailwind-cli	TAILWIND_CLI		Path to the Tailwind standalone binary (else PATH / npx)
--cache-size		1024	ARC cache entry limit

Development

task fmt          # Format, lint, and test
task local        # Start app with Minio + LM Studio
task css          # Recompile the embedded admin stylesheet
task minio:start  # Start Minio in background
task minio:stop   # Stop Minio
task minio:ready  # Start Minio if not running
task test:llm     # Opt-in real-model integration tests (see below)

Real-model integration tests

Every other test stubs the agent. task test:llm instead drives the real agent loop (prompt → tools → lint/retry → CSS → describe) against a local model, catching prompt/tool/lint-loop regressions the stubs can't. It requires LM Studio running plus Minio, is opt-in (gated by TOPBANANA_LLM_E2E=1), is slow (minutes), and is excluded from the default go test/task fmt run. Assertions are structural invariants (build completes, index.html non-empty, lint clean, a write_file call happened), not exact model output.

task lmstudio:ready loads a model with a 16K context — this matters: the build agent's system prompt is several thousand tokens, so the default 4096 context starves the model (it never gets room to call write_file). If you load a model by hand, give it at least a 16K context.

Custom Domains with Cloudflare

A Top Banana site can be served on any external domain (e.g. myblog.com) by attaching the hostname under Settings → Custom web address and pointing DNS at your origin. Putting Cloudflare in front gives you free TLS and a global cache; Top Banana already emits the right cache headers, so the Cloudflare config is small.

1. Add the domain in Top Banana

Open Settings for the site and add the hostnames you'll be using — one per line:

myblog.com
www.myblog.com

Save. The server rebuilds its host → slug index immediately; requests carrying those Host headers now resolve to that site.

2. Point DNS at your origin (Cloudflare)

In the Cloudflare dashboard for the zone:

• Apex (myblog.com) — CNAME record to your origin hostname (e.g. origin.example.com). Cloudflare flattens CNAMEs at the apex automatically.
• www.myblog.com — CNAME to the same origin hostname.
• Set Proxy status: Proxied (orange cloud) on both records so traffic flows through Cloudflare's edge.

If you're running Top Banana behind a bare IP, use A records instead of CNAME — same idea.

3. SSL/TLS

Top Banana listens on plain HTTP. Terminate TLS at Cloudflare (or with a Caddy/nginx reverse proxy on the origin):

• SSL/TLS → Overview → Encryption mode:
  • Full (or Full (strict)) if you put a TLS-terminating proxy in front of Top Banana.
  • Flexible if Top Banana is exposed over plain HTTP — Cloudflare ↔ visitor is HTTPS, Cloudflare ↔ origin is HTTP. Easier to set up; weaker than Full.
• SSL/TLS → Edge Certificates → Always Use HTTPS: on.

4. Caching

Top Banana sends explicit cache directives:

Path on a custom domain	Cache-Control
HTML / CSS / JS / images	public, max-age=300, s-maxage=3600 (+ Vary: Accept-Encoding, ETag)
/api/* (dynamic state)	no-store, private (+ Pragma: no-cache, Vary: *)

Cloudflare's default cache only stores certain file extensions, so extensionless URLs like / won't be cached unless you say so. Create one Cache Rule:

• Caching → Cache Rules → Create rule
• Name: Top Banana — respect origin headers
• When incoming requests match: Hostname equals myblog.com (add a second or for www.myblog.com)
• Then:
  • Cache eligibility: Eligible for cache
  • Edge TTL: Use cache-control header from origin
  • Browser TTL: Use cache-control header from origin

That single rule is enough: Cloudflare obeys the no-store on /api/* and the public TTL on static content.

5. Cache invalidation

Site edits propagate within the 5-minute max-age window. If you need a change live immediately, purge from Caching → Configuration → Purge cache (single-file purge by URL is enough).

Agent Constraints

The LLM agent operates under strict rules (defined in internal/agent/agent_prompt.md):

• Only .html files — CSS and JS must be inlined
• Every site requires an index.html entry point
• No external CDNs or frameworks; everything self-contained
• All links between pages must use relative URLs
• The design substrate is the self-hosted /app.css (Tailwind + daisyUI), injected per-site after the build

Code Layout

cmd/topbanana/      CLI entry point and configuration (Kong)
internal/server/    HTTP server, subdomain routing, admin UI, SSE build events
internal/build/     Build service, agent orchestration, per-site CSS compile
internal/agent/     LLM agent prompt and file tools
internal/auth/      Passkey auth, users, invites, S3-backed sessions
internal/store/     S3 storage abstraction with ARC cache
internal/state/     Per-site key/value state for form submissions
internal/sandbox/   Server-function (JS) execution
internal/snapshot/  Version history + export/import archives
internal/editrec/   Build transcripts (the /debug surface)
internal/lint/      HTML validation and link checking
internal/model/     LLM provider resolution (Claude, OpenAI, LM Studio)
internal/assets/    Embedded admin stylesheet + vendored daisyUI
internal/templates/ Starter site templates (prompt + skeleton + examples)

Starter Templates

New sites can be bootstrapped from a template: blank, birthday, case-study, contact-form, email-capture, event, guestbook, landing-page, link-in-bio, portfolio, pricing, restaurant, resume, tiny-shop, and waitlist.