Collaboration.

Notebooks start local and stay local until you publish. After that, you can edit together in real time, comment on cells, and share read-only links with anyone.

The local-first model

Every project starts on your machine. Your .orchid files live in a directory you pick; agents, kernels, and data all run locally. There's no cloud roundtrip in the inner loop — open the app and you're working.

Publishing is opt-in. Click Publish and the project syncs to Orchid's cloud, picking up a canonical URL at <slug>.orchidide.com. From there, invited collaborators can clone it, comment on it, and edit alongside you in real time.

Two avatars editing different cells in the same notebook, with comments threaded on one cell./docs-images/collaboration/overview.png

Edit together, comment in place, publish when ready.

What lives where

Real-time editing — presence, cursors, soft locks per cell.
Comments — threads on selections, mentions, resolutions.
Publishing — local-first → cloud-canonical, first publisher wins, share viewer.
Permissions — roles, who can edit what, revoking access.

Connections stay local

Database connections never sync. When you publish a project, the cloud knows the connection profile name — "warehouse", "analytics-replica" — but not the host, the credentials, or the query results unless they're in a snapshot. Collaborators supply their own connections locally; refresh jobs use credentials you configure explicitly.

# What syncs when you publish
project:
  notebooks: yes        # cell sources + saved outputs
  dashboards: yes       # layouts + tile sources
  assets: yes           # files under .orchid/assets/
  outputs: snapshot     # last serialized output of each cell
  connections: NO       # profile names only, no credentials
  kernel state: NO      # in-memory variables stay local

Tip

Want to share something one-off without committing to publishing? Export to HTML — a single static file you can email or drop into a Slack channel.

Comments & review

Comments work on selections — drag across a range in a code or SQL cell, pick text inside a markdown cell, then hit Cmd+Shift+M. Threads attach to the cell, survive edits, and archive automatically when the cell is deleted. Mentions notify your collaborators in-app and by email.

First-publisher-wins

When you publish a local project for the first time, that machine's copy becomes the cloud-canonical version. Other people with local copies sync down on next open. The invariant is simple: there's exactly one cloud version, and the first publisher owns it. More on that in Publishing.

Up next: Real-time editing, Comments, Publishing, and Permissions.