Join a machine to your Northlight account

Joining makes this machine one of your Northlight account's machines, so crtr cloud … commands run as you. App builders need it for the two things the console cannot do yet: deleting an app and setting its run notice URL (Manage your app). Everything else about building an app is on the SDK docs site.

Create your account at https://account.northlight.ai/signup first. Then install the CLI (npm i -g @north-light/cli). Joining needs crtr 0.3.436 or later (older versions need crtr sys daemon stop first and fail if a viewer is open); crtr --version shows yours.

Then join your laptop to the account:

1. Open https://account.northlight.ai/account/machines and choose Create join token. A token needs a sign-in within the last 10 minutes, so the page asks you to sign in again if yours is older.

2. The page shows the join command with the token filled in. On your laptop, run it from a plain terminal: crtr sys join --directory https://account.northlight.ai --token <token>. Leave your crtr windows open: join stops the daemon itself, holds it down while it writes your identity (so an open viewer cannot restart it early), and starts it again on the joined settings. Run it outside any crtr node, because a node's engine stops with the daemon; from inside one, join refuses with join_inside_node. Add --name <label> to name the machine on the page. The token works once and expires at the time the page shows; the page shows it only once.

   crtr sys join --directory https://account.northlight.ai --token <token> --name my-laptop

   It answers with registered: true, the machine id (runtime:<id>), your user id and daemon: restarted (daemon: started when crtr was not running: join starts the daemon, and its first grant sync installs crtr cloud … and your other provider plugins). Your open viewers and nodes reconnect on their own.

3. Check it: crtr cloud apps mine lists the apps you manage. Before you have joined, it answers not_joined and prints these same steps.

Things to know before you join:

• Joining rewrites your crtr home. Everything in your everyday crtr home that belonged to the local user (user:local) becomes your Northlight user, the next time the daemon starts. If you would rather not do that to your everyday home, join from a home you can throw away.
• There is no unjoin. The only undo is removing the machine on /account/machines.
• Removing the machine stops it. Once you choose Remove next to a machine, it gets no new tokens at once and the ones it holds expire within 5 minutes. After that its cloud commands answer machine_revoked: "This machine was removed from your Northlight account." It stays that way until you create a new join token and run crtr sys join again. Files on the computer stay on it.
• Your hosted machine is unchanged. /account/machines lists it as "Northlight (hosted)", the default. Your chat agent at https://chat.northlight.ai still runs crtr cloud apps … as before.

crtr cloud apps

Every app-management leaf of Northlight's cloud provider runs as you and needs a joined machine. The console does the same work for all of them except delete and set-run-notice-url. --app-id takes app:<client id> or the bare client id.

Your Northlight chat agent at https://chat.northlight.ai can run these commands as you, on your hosted runtime. It can list and change an app (mine and set-scopes were checked on production). It cannot delete one. Generate keys on your laptop and give an agent only a public JWK, never the private key.

Deleting an app removes every person's grant for it and cannot be undone. Each runtime deletes the app's runs, space and schedules, and the app's next refresh fails with invalid_grant. Apps that hold the provider role cannot be deleted.