Mantis documentation - mantis

Mantis is a self-hostable canary key service. It gives you trigger URLs that fire when someone opens a bait file, starts a host event, hits a planted link, or trips an operational monitor.

Start here

Getting started covers CLI install through your first key.
Trying it locally covers Docker evaluation, contributor setup, and benchmarks.
Use cases shows defensive, detective, operational, and adversarial-research patterns.

Deploy Mantis

Deployment overview helps choose between local Docker, tunnels, and PaaS hosts.
Local Docker is for evaluation and development.
Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnel expose a local host safely.
Railway, Fly.io, and Render run Mantis as a long-running service.
mantis-edge covers the stateless Cloudflare Worker variant.

Build with Mantis

HTTP API documents endpoints, trigger responses, and webhook payloads.
File keys, honey directories, and host-event keys cover the main trigger surfaces.
Self-hosted app recipes show where to plant canaries in common apps.