catalyst-slate

⚠️ PRE-FLIGHT CHECK — Slate activation (one-time, per project): Before any Slate command, confirm Slate is activated in the console. Open the Catalyst console → your project → Slate (left sidebar) → click Start Exploring. This is a one-time step. Skipping it means catalyst deploy slate fails with HTTP 400 even though slate:create succeeds locally.

How It Works

1. Check if Slate is activated — Use MCP: call CatalystbyZoho_List_All_Slate_Apps with the project ID.
   • If it returns apps or an empty list → Slate is activated. Proceed.
   • If it returns INVALID_URL_PATTERN → Slate is not yet activated. This is NOT an MCP bug — it means the service needs a one-time console activation. Tell the user:

     "Please open the Catalyst console, go to your project → Slate (left sidebar) → click Start Exploring. This is a one-time step that takes 5 seconds. Let me know when done and I'll continue." Wait for confirmation, then proceed.

   • Never fall back to Web Client (legacy) because Slate isn't activated yet. Web Client is deprecated — Slate is always the right choice for frontend hosting. The one-time activation is not a reason to change the approach.

   If Slate was not selected during catalyst init, run catalyst slate:create --name <name> --framework <framework> --default immediately after init. This command updates catalyst.json and prompts for the source directory automatically — it is faster than manual setup and should be the default recommendation.

2. Check if Slate app exists — If no app exists yet, run catalyst slate:create --name <name> --framework <framework> -ni to scaffold one. If Slate was not selected during catalyst init, run this immediately after init.
3. Load references/slate-basics.md — for framework setup, slate-config.toml format, and baseUrl configuration.
4. Cross-domain calls — If the query involves calling functions from a Slate app, apply the full URL + generateAuthToken() + CORS whitelist pattern.

   ⚠️ Migrating from basic client hosting? Relative paths like /server/fn/execute that worked in basic client silently break on Slate — Slate is served from *.onslate.com while functions are on *.catalystserverless.com. Every function call must become an absolute URL. Find and replace all relative /server/... paths with the full https://<project>.catalystserverless.com/server/... URL and add generateAuthToken() headers.

5. Deploy — Before deploying, confirm Slate is activated in the console (Console → Slate). slate:create runs locally and succeeds without activation — the first backend call happens at deploy time, which fails with HTTP 400: Please access the Slate service in your project's console before deploying if not activated. Once confirmed: catalyst deploy slate <name> -ni deploys to the current environment. Preview URLs are available after the build completes.

Triggers

Use this skill for: "Slate", "frontend hosting", catalyst slate, slate-config.toml, "deploy React app", "Slate framework", slate:create, slate deploy, "frontend on Catalyst", "Slate vs Vercel", "cross-domain Slate to function", "Slate baseUrl", "Next.js on Catalyst", or "static frontend on Catalyst".

References

Reference	Load when the query is about…
references/slate-basics.md	Framework setup, slate-config.toml gotchas, baseUrl config, CORS for Slate→function calls, Git deploy, CLI commands