Host Chest on Cloudflare

Chest can run on your own Cloudflare account instead of your computer, at its own web address, for everyone on your team. It uses three Cloudflare pieces: a Worker (the app), a D1 database (people, folders, sharing, history) and an R2 bucket (every original file). People sign in by email, so a hosted Chest also needs a mail provider. Everything below runs from the Chest folder on your computer.

What you need

• Chest set up on your computer. Follow Run Chest on your computer with --owner-email set to the mailbox you will sign in with. That address becomes the hosted owner.
• A Cloudflare account with R2 turned on (Cloudflare dashboard, R2, then follow its one-time setup). Copy your Account ID from the dashboard, then create an API token at dash.cloudflare.com/profile/api-tokens with these account permissions: Workers Scripts: Edit, D1: Edit and Workers R2 Storage: Edit.
• A mail provider: SendGrid or Resend. Verify the sender address there first (SendGrid: Settings › Sender Authentication; Resend: Domains), then create an API key that can send mail.

Choose the settings

Put your settings in a private file in the Chest folder, for example chest.env, readable only by you:

CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID=your-account-id
CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN=your-api-token
MAIL_PROVIDER=sendgrid
MAIL_FROM=files@example.com
SENDGRID_API_KEY=SG.your-key

chmod 600 chest.env

• MAIL_PROVIDER is sendgrid or resend. Leave it out and Chest uses the provider whose key you set.
• MAIL_FROM is the sender you verified. It may carry a name: MAIL_FROM="Example Files <files@example.com>".
• With Resend, set RESEND_API_KEY instead of SENDGRID_API_KEY.
• rer setup and rer deploy --dry-run may list this key as MAIL_API_KEY. It is the same key under rer's general name: set SENDGRID_API_KEY or RESEND_API_KEY as above (or MAIL_API_KEY, which works too), and Chest uses it.

These are deploy settings: you never edit deploy.json. The same names work as environment variables instead of a file.

Deploy

Pick an environment name, such as production (lower-case letters, digits and hyphens, kept short). Check first, then deploy:

rer deploy --environment production --env-file chest.env --dry-run
rer deploy --environment production --env-file chest.env

The check builds Chest and lists anything still missing, without touching Cloudflare. The deploy creates the Worker chest-production, the database chest-production-db and the bucket chest-production-blobs, makes your setup email the owner and prints the address, for example https://chest-production.your-subdomain.workers.dev.

Keep the .rer/deploy folder that the deploy writes. It records which Cloudflare resources belong to this Chest, so later deploys and removal touch only those.

To change the sender or provider later, edit chest.env and run the same deploy command again. Your files and people stay.

Sign in

Open the address and choose Sign in. Enter the owner email and choose Email a sign-in link. Open the email (from your MAIL_FROM sender, subject "Your sign-in link for Chest"), choose Confirm, then Finish setup. Chest opens on Files.

Invite your team from People & settings: each person gets an email and signs in the same way. See Set up Chest.

If no email arrives, check the sender is verified with your provider and look in spam. To get in without mail, rer signin --environment production --env-file chest.env prints a one-time owner sign-in link in your terminal.

Receive files by email

A hosted Chest can give a space its own email address: files attached to emails sent there land in a folder you choose. It needs a domain name whose DNS is on your Cloudflare account, with Cloudflare Email Routing (free) turned on. If the domain already receives your mail elsewhere (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365), use a subdomain such as files.example.com so that mail is not affected.

Open Files › Filing agents › Email intake. Choose a space, an inbox folder and an address at your domain, then Save intake. In the Cloudflare dashboard open the domain, Email › Email Routing (turn it on and let Cloudflare add its records), then Routing rules › Create address: type the part before the @, choose Send to a Worker and pick chest-production (the Worker your deploy made). Send a test email with an attachment; it shows under Received attachments.

Without a domain on Cloudflare, use a file request instead: open a folder and Create file request for a link anyone can upload to, with no account.

Where your files are kept

Every original file and every version lives in the R2 bucket, stored once per distinct content. The database holds everything else. Nothing is kept on your computer, so back up the hosted Chest itself.

Back up a hosted Chest

rer export saves only the copy on your computer and refuses a hosted address. To back up the hosted Chest, run Chest's hosted backup from the same folder:

rer run hosted-backup --environment production --env-file chest.env

rer run uses the Node that rer keeps for itself, so this works right after the install.sh install with nothing else to set up. If something stops it (a wrong environment name, the wrong Cloudflare token, a dropped connection), it says so in one line and saves nothing partial you need to clean up: fix that and run the same command again.

It saves the whole database (with wrangler d1 export --remote) and every original file from the bucket, each checked against its SHA-256, into a new folder such as exports/hosted-production-2026-10-17T09-00-00, readable only by you. The folder holds every file and record, so keep it private and keep a second copy somewhere safe.

Restore a hosted backup

Restore into a freshly deployed environment of the same Chest version, before anyone adds files to it:

rer deploy --environment production --env-file chest.env
rer run hosted-restore --environment production --input exports/hosted-production-2026-10-17T09-00-00 --env-file chest.env

The restore checks the backup's checksums, that the database versions match and that the new Chest holds nothing yet, before it writes anything. It puts every original back, then replaces the database with the backup's. People sign in again by email. If you read scans with an AI model key, enter the key again under People & settings. Company sign-in is locked to the deployment it was saved in, so the restore switches it off: if you used it, enter your provider's details again under People & settings › Company sign-in and test it. SCIM tokens, links and file requests keep working. Invitations sent before the backup stop working: invite anyone who had not accepted yet again, with the same email.

Remove a hosted Chest

Removal deletes the Worker, the database and the bucket, with every file in them. Back up first, then remove from the folder that deployed it:

rer run hosted-backup --environment production --env-file chest.env
rer deploy --environment production --env-file chest.env --remove --yes

Remove only after the backup ends with "Backed up … to exports/…". If the backup stopped with a message instead, nothing is removed yet: fix what it names and back up again before you remove.

rer deletes only what this environment's deploy created, then reads back that none of it remains. The address stops working at once.