# Mantis documentation
Source: https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/

Install, deploy, operate, and extend Mantis canary keys.

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.

## Start here

- [Getting started](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/getting-started) covers CLI install through your first key.
- [Trying it locally](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/trying-locally) covers Docker evaluation, contributor setup, and benchmarks.
- [Use cases](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/use-cases) shows defensive, detective, operational, and adversarial-research patterns.

## Deploy Mantis

- [Deployment overview](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/deployment) helps choose between local Docker, tunnels, and PaaS hosts.
- [Local Docker](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/deployment/docker-local) is for evaluation and development.
- [Tailscale](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/deployment/tailscale) and [Cloudflare Tunnel](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/deployment/cloudflare) expose a local host safely.
- [Railway](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/deployment/railway), [Fly.io](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/deployment/fly), and [Render](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/deployment/render) run Mantis as a long-running service.
- [mantis-edge](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/edge-deployment) covers the stateless Cloudflare Worker variant.

## Build with Mantis

- [HTTP API](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/api) documents endpoints, trigger responses, and webhook payloads.
- [File keys](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/file-keys), [honey directories](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/honey-directory), and [host-event keys](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/host-events) cover the main trigger surfaces.
- [Self-hosted app recipes](https://docs.mantis.privacykey.org/self-hosted-apps) show where to plant canaries in common apps.

## Use these docs with an AI assistant

The site follows the [llms.txt](https://llmstxt.org) 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.