pbcp — AI-native hosting

1. Start with site onboarding

The preferred starting point is sites.onboard. It creates or reuses the hosted domain record first, then returns the correct DNS-first next step instead of guessing.

# What to tell your AI:
"Onboard example.com for hosting"
# or, if you do not have a custom domain yet:
"Create a managed subdomain for slug happyviber"

If you need full manual control, domains.create still exists. But for normal conversational use, sites.onboard is the better entry point.

2. Decide your DNS strategy

For custom domains, decide whether pbcp should manage DNS through Cloudflare or whether you will keep DNS somewhere else and update records manually. For managed subdomains, pbcp can skip this choice because it already controls the parent zone.

# What to tell your AI:
"I want pbcp to host DNS for example.com"
# or
"I want to keep DNS at my registrar, tell me which records to create"

This is the first branching point. The right next step depends on that answer.

3. If using pbcp Cloudflare DNS, create the zone and set nameservers

In the new onboarding flow, sites.onboard can create the Cloudflare zone and the initial web records for you. If you want to do it manually, the lower-level dns.zones.create tool still works for a domain you already own in pbcp.

# What to tell your AI:
"Onboard example.com and use pbcp Cloudflare DNS"

# The response includes the assigned nameservers, e.g.:
#   name_servers: ["aria.ns.cloudflare.com", "todd.ns.cloudflare.com"]

If the domain is already on Cloudflare, onboarding will reuse the existing zone. For managed subdomains, no registrar change is needed because pbcp writes DNS directly into the configured parent Cloudflare zone.

4. Point your registrar to Cloudflare's nameservers

At your domain registrar (Namecheap, GoDaddy, Porkbun, etc.), replace the default nameservers with the two Cloudflare gave you.

5. Create or confirm DNS records

If pbcp is hosting DNS through onboarding, the initial web records are already created. If you are using the lower-level tools, ask your AI to create the records in Cloudflare. If you are keeping DNS elsewhere, ask your AI which records you need and create them at your current DNS provider. In both cases, the usual baseline is:

# What to tell your AI:
"Create an A record for example.com pointing to 203.0.113.10"
"Create a CNAME record for www.example.com pointing to example.com"

Your AI will use dns.records.create when pbcp manages the zone, or it can simply tell you the record set to create elsewhere.

6. Verify public DNS before SSL

Do not request Let's Encrypt yet. First confirm that public DNS is correct. pbcp exposes two tools for this:

• dns.lookup_public shows the public NS, CNAME, A/AAAA, and MX observations.
• ssl.readiness tells you whether the requested hostnames currently resolve to this server well enough for pbcp's webroot Let's Encrypt flow.

# What to tell your AI:
"Check whether example.com is ready for SSL"
"Inspect the public DNS for example.com"

7. Request the SSL certificate

Once ssl.readiness says the hostnames resolve to this server, request a free Let's Encrypt certificate:

# What to tell your AI:
"Request SSL for example.com, include www"

The ssl.request tool runs Certbot in the background. If you skip the readiness check and DNS is still wrong, the certificate request will fail.

8. Create a database

WordPress needs a MySQL database. Ask your AI to create one:

# What to tell your AI:
"Create a MySQL database called wp_example for my site"

The databases.create tool will set up the database and user.

9. Install WordPress

Everything is in place. Tell your AI to install WordPress:

# What to tell your AI:
"Install WordPress on example.com with admin email me@example.com"

The wordpress.install tool downloads WordPress, wires up the database, and creates the admin account. When it's done, you can ask for a one-time login link with wordpress.login_url.