Deploy to Cloud Engine

What This Is

A cloud engine is a user-owned slice of Internet Computer capacity, administered from a web console (by default https://opencloud.org). Each engine runs on a single subnet. This skill takes a project that already builds and gets it deployed onto that engine, from a coding agent or an AI chat app.

This skill only covers the cloud-engine-specific steps: choosing how to deploy, signing in as an identity the engine accepts, and putting the canisters on the engine. For everything else about the CLI (icp.yaml, recipes, environments, bindings, identities), load the icp-cli skill.

Choose the Deploy Route First

There are two ways onto an engine. Pick one before you write any code: the route decides how the deploy signs in and what you can ship.

• ICP MCP connector. DFINITY's official MCP server for the Internet Computer. It is available natively in ChatGPT (the plugin Internet Computer (ICP) by DFINITY Stiftung) and in Claude, and any MCP-capable app can add it as a custom connector at https://mcp.internetcomputer.org/mcp (setup steps: https://mcp.internetcomputer.org/). It signs as the user with the Internet Identity session they authorized in the chat app, so nothing needs a local CLI, a browser on your machine, or a loopback. You deploy a wasm through the engine's engine-operator canister. See "ICP MCP Route".
• icp CLI. icp identity link web, then icp deploy --subnet. The full toolchain (recipes, asset canisters, icp.yaml), but the sign-in completes only when icp runs on the same machine as the user's browser. See Steps 1 to 4.

Decide like this: