Docly Developers
Knowledge base Misconception By design

Use a docly CLI working copy instead of git

In shortDocly has no git service: there is no git remote to clone from or push to. A Docly workspace is the live application, not a working copy. When you want a local working copy, a diff and a review step before anything goes live, use the docly CLI: docly clone gives you local files, docly status and docly diff show what you changed, and docly push publishes it.
Applies to Workspace setupAI agents

  1. What you'll see

    Someone — often an AI coding agent on its first pass — looks for a .git directory to get version control before starting work, or for a git remote to clone the site from. Neither exists.

  2. What's actually happening

    Docly has no git service. There is no git remote for a workspace or a folder, and no git URL to clone. Version control of a Docly site is not done with git.

    The workspace is the live application. There is no working copy on the server — the files in the workspace are the running site.

    The working copy you are looking for is the docly CLI. docly clone downloads a folder into local files, docly status and docly diff show what you changed against the server, and nothing goes live until docly push. Writing is locked until someone opens one folder for writing, so the blast radius is bounded. Documents whose schema keeps versions also have server-side history (docly history).

    A CLI working copy is ordinary local files. If you want your own git history on top of it, you can run git init in the working copy on your own disk — that is a private repository for you, not a connection to Docly, and it is never pushed anywhere by Docly.

  3. What to do

    For a working copy, use the CLI:

    docly login
docly clone <folder> work && cd work
# edit the files
docly status
docly diff
docly unlock <folder>   # writing is locked until a folder is opened
docly push

    Run docly with no arguments for the full command reference. For AI agents, see How an AI agent should use the docly CLI.

    Say in the workspace's agent instruction file that changes go through the CLI, so an agent does not have to guess — see Set up AI agent instruction files for a workspace.

Last reviewed 19 Oct 2026