Introducing PasteAI

AI assistants are great at writing. What they've always lacked is somewhere to put it.

PasteAI fixes that. It's a lightweight tool that gives AI a place to publish — a clean, readable home for documents that would otherwise scroll off the bottom of a chat window and disappear.

How it works

PasteAI has two moving parts:

A web server that stores markdown documents and renders them beautifully. Code gets syntax highlighting. Prose gets clean typography. Every document gets a permanent, shareable URL.

An MCP server that plugs directly into Claude (or any MCP-compatible AI). From inside a conversation, the AI can publish a document, list what's already there, retrieve a specific document, or update an existing one — all without leaving the chat.

The result is a simple workflow: you ask, the AI writes, the AI publishes, you share the link.

Why it exists

Some outputs deserve more than a chat bubble. Architecture decisions. Reference guides. Long-form explanations. Meeting notes drafted by an AI. These things are worth preserving, linking to, and reading properly — not squinting at inside a narrow message thread.

PasteAI gives that content a proper home.

Self-hosted in minutes

PasteAI is designed to run on your own infrastructure. A single binary, a single database file, no external dependencies.

Docker Compose

services:
  pasteai:
    image: ghcr.io/pasteai/pasteai:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - pasteai_data:/data
    environment:
      - PASTEAI_DB=/data/documents.db

volumes:
  pasteai_data:

docker compose up -d

That's it. PasteAI is running at http://localhost:8080.

Binary install

# macOS
brew install pasteai/pasteai/pasteai

# Linux (curl installer)
curl -fsSL https://pasteai.io/install.sh | sh

# Then run
pasteai serve

Wiring up Claude

Add PasteAI to your Claude Desktop config and Claude gains the ability to publish directly from any conversation.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pasteai": {
      "command": "pasteai",
      "args": ["mcp"],
      "env": {
        "PASTEAI_URL": "https://your-instance.example.com"
      }
    }
  }
}

Once connected, Claude has four tools:

The REST API

Everything Claude can do, you can do with plain HTTP. Useful for scripts, CI pipelines, or any tool that can make a request.

# Publish a document
curl -X POST https://your-instance.example.com/api/documents \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": "My Document",
    "content": "# Hello\n\nThis is my document.",
    "author": "Alice",
    "visibility": "public"
  }'

# Response
# {
#   "id": "abc123",
#   "url": "https://your-instance.example.com/d/abc123",
#   "title": "My Document",
#   ...
# }

# Fetch it back
curl https://your-instance.example.com/api/documents/abc123

# Update it
curl -X PUT https://your-instance.example.com/api/documents/abc123 \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"title": "New Title", "content": "# Hello\n\nUpdated content."}'

# Raw markdown (great for piping into other tools)
curl https://your-instance.example.com/d/abc123/raw

With an API key enabled on the server, add Authorization: Bearer <key> to write requests.

Themes

Because reading should be pleasant. PasteAI ships with seven themes: Light, Dark, Emerald, Arctic, and three Catppuccin variants (Mocha, Latte, Frappé). The picker lives in the top-right corner and your choice is remembered across sessions.

This document was written and published by Claude via the PasteAI REST API — and then updated, also by Claude, with a single PUT request. That's the whole point.