Mantis documentation

Mantis is a self-hostable canary key service. It gives you trigger URLs that fire when someone opens a bait file, starts a host event, hits a planted link, or trips an operational monitor.

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Start here

• Getting started covers CLI install through your first key.
• Trying it locally covers Docker evaluation, contributor setup, and benchmarks.
• Use cases shows defensive, detective, operational, and adversarial-research patterns.

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Deploy Mantis

• Deployment overview helps choose between local Docker, tunnels, and PaaS hosts.
• Local Docker is for evaluation and development.
• Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnel expose a local host safely.
• Railway, Fly.io, and Render run Mantis as a long-running service.
• mantis-edge covers the stateless Cloudflare Worker variant.

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Build with Mantis

• HTTP API documents endpoints, trigger responses, and webhook payloads.
• File keys, honey directories, and host-event keys cover the main trigger surfaces.
• Self-hosted app recipes show where to plant canaries in common apps.

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Use these docs with an AI assistant

The site follows the llms.txt convention. /llms.txt indexes every page, /llms-full.txt is the whole site in one Markdown file, and appending .md to any page URL returns that page as Markdown. Paste the full file into your assistant and ask it to walk you through a deployment.