Take a local board online

Plan Desk is local-first by default: plandesk init && plandesk serve runs entirely on your machine, no account, no network. Going online is an opt-in step you take when you want your board reachable from somewhere other than 127.0.0.1 — for a teammate, another machine, or just to stop worrying about backups.

This guide takes work you’ve already been planning locally — a single project or a whole workspace of them — and promotes it into a hosted organization. Plan Desk’s tenancy is Org → Workspace → Project; see Workspaces.

1. Pick a hosted home

You have two options, and they use the exact same CLI flow:

• Managed — sign in at plandesk.asyncdot.com. asyncdot runs the server; you bring nothing but a browser and a GitHub account.
• Self-hosted — stand up your own instance (Docker or Cloudflare Workers) and point the same commands at it with --server <your-url>. See Self-host Plan Desk for your team for the full runbook, or the deployment topologies overview if you’re still deciding.

Everything below reads the same either way — swap in your own server URL wherever plandesk login appears.

2. Sign in and get a CLI token

Open the hosted dashboard and sign in with GitHub. The first time you sign in, Plan Desk auto-provisions a personal organization for you — you’re its owner, with nothing to configure.

Once signed in, go to Settings → MCP → Generate CLI token and copy the org-wide owner key. It’s shown once — store it somewhere safe before you navigate away.

3. plandesk login

Back in your terminal:

plandesk login --server <your-hosted-url>

Omit --server to use the built-in default (https://plandesk.asyncdot.com). Paste the token when prompted. It’s written to ~/.plandesk/config.json alongside the server URL and your organization id — this is a one-time, per-machine step, not per-repo.

4. Promote your local work

You have two paths. Use go-online when you’ve organized your work into workspaces — it carries the whole structure up. Use push for a single project.

Take a whole workspace online (go-online)

plandesk go-online pushes one or more local workspaces — and every project in them — up to a hosted org, creating each hosted workspace if it doesn’t exist yet. It’s idempotent: re-running skips projects whose names already exist in the destination workspace.

plandesk go-online --to <org-id> --all                         # every local workspace
plandesk go-online --to <org-id> --workspace "Fiji TV" --workspace "Acme"   # just these
plandesk go-online --to <org-id>                                # pick interactively

On success it reports how many workspaces and projects it pushed, plus per-workspace counts. --to <org-id> is required; the server and owner token come from plandesk login (override with --server / --token). Because projects import into the org-default workspace and are then moved into their target workspace, each hosted project’s workspace_id matches its team.

Promote a single project (push)

For a one-off project that isn’t part of a workspace, from the repo where it has been living locally:

plandesk push --to <org-id>

push requires --to <org-id> — there’s no ambient “current org,” you always say which one. On success it prints:

Promoted to org <orgId> as <globalProjectId> on <serverUrl>.

The server URL it promotes to comes from .plandesk/config.json’s serverUrl if the repo is already connected, otherwise from --remote/--url, falling back to the server you logged into. The token comes from plandesk login. This is a one-way promotion — your local project’s full plan (tasks, edges, documents, notes, comments) is copied into the hosted org as a new project.

5. Bind the repo for your agent

Your coding agent still needs a way to reach the board over MCP — and it should never hold your owner key. Mint it a scoped one:

plandesk connect --to <org-id> --project <id|name>      # one project: project-scoped key
plandesk connect --to <org-id> --workspace "Fiji TV"    # whole workspace: workspace-scoped key

This mints a scoped agent key (not your owner key) and writes it to .plandesk/token (gitignored) — project-scoped with --project, workspace-scoped with --workspace. .mcp.json reads it automatically. Start a new agent session afterward so MCP tools reload.

You’re online

Your board now lives in the hosted org, and your agent talks to it with a key scoped to just this project. From here:

• Working solo, self-hosted or managed — you’re done.
• Bringing a team onto a shared, always-on instance — continue to Self-host Plan Desk for your team to invite them and connect their repos.