Publishing a Nest

Publishing makes a nest readable — to people, to agents, and to external systems that mirror it. You control read access with a public/private visibility toggle, snapshot approved content into a served index, preview what public readers will see, export a portable bundle for re-import elsewhere, and stream changes so external copies stay in sync. There is no separate paywall: hosting is license-gated writes plus a public/private read toggle.

Making a nest public

Set a nest's visibility to public to allow unauthenticated read access:

PATCH /nests/:id/visibility

{ "visibility": "public" }

Public readers see only approved snapshots. The author and collaborator roster is hidden from public readers — visibility exposes content, not the people behind it.

Publishing a snapshot

Snapshot the nest's approved content and (re)build its served index:

POST /nests/:id/publish

Only approved content is included in the published snapshot, consistent with the governance model in Governance & Stewardship.

Previewing approved-only

Preview exactly what a public reader will see — the approved-only view — with a query flag:

GET /nests/:id/...?approved_only=1

This lets you confirm the public surface before flipping visibility.

Exporting a portable bundle

Export the nest as a portable .zip bundle that can be re-imported on another host:

GET /export?format=bundle

The bundle is portable across hosts, so a nest published on one host can be re-imported and re-hosted on another. Export is available to the viewer role.

Keeping external copies in sync

To mirror a nest into an external system (built for GitHub / GitBook mirroring), poll the changes feed:

GET /nests/:id/changes?since=<ISO>&include_content=1

The response returns documents changed since the given ISO timestamp, including full content when include_content=1, plus deletion tombstones so a mirror can remove documents that were deleted upstream. This makes incremental, one-way mirroring straightforward.

Agent entry point: llms.txt

A published nest exposes a public agent manual at:

GET /llms.txt

This is the agent-facing entry point for the nest — a public manual an agent can read to understand what the nest offers and how to consume it. For agents that connect over the Model Context Protocol, see the MCP Server; for framework retrieval clients, see Connectors.

A note on "gating"

There is no separate paywall on reading a nest. Two independent controls govern access:

Reading is governed by the visibility toggle; monetization is on the write/hosting side, not behind a read paywall.

Related

• Folders — organizing content before publishing.
• Connectors — reading a published nest from an agent framework.

Sources

• PromptOwl/contextnest-community PRs: #179, #103, #101, #12, #62.