Quickstart

This guide focuses on publishing your first play and finding success on our platform.


Prerequisites

  • GitHub account
  • Github repository

Key Steps

  • Authenticate
  • Draft a play
  • Submission flow
  • Share your play
  • Track performance
  • Getting paid

Authenticate

To get started, we recommend signing up via GitHub. This automatically links your account, allowing us to publish plays on your behalf, create teams, and clone plays directly to your GitHub account.


Draft a Play

To draft your first play, simply paste a GitHub URL into the appropriate field on the homepage and click submit. Behind the scenes, this fetches the repository or subdirectory from GitHub, pulls it into our ecosystem, formats it, contextualizes it, and prepares it for deployment -- all before you've filled out a single detail. After this step finishes, you can come and go from the submission flow (covered in the next step) as you please.


Your Submission

The submission flow offers a robust wizard that walks you through the necessary steps to deploy and publish your play.

Welcome

Select the type of play which will determine the number of credits required to download your play.

Basics

Fill out the remaining profile information and add a thumbnail if needed.

Connection

Validate or manage your connection to the host GitHub repository.

Media

Add an interactive video or cover image to properly showcase your work.

Technology

Add or update the pre-filled taxonomy for your play. This ensures it appears in the appropriate areas of the platform while informing users about the underlying technology.

Demo

Preview and configure your demo so it deploys correctly on our platform. You can use the built-in options to generate a Dockerfile on the fly, supply your own Docker configuration, or select a partial for deployment. Add any necessary environment variables or private files to the demo. These are end-to-end (E2E) encrypted and are only injected at runtime. While deploying, you can view logs and statistics across all your services using the bottom navigation bar. You can also use the shell for direct access and quick debugging in your sandbox. Critical note: your demo must deploy successfully to publish your play.

Review

Review and confirm our community checklist. Add notes for our team. Finally, click to publish your play.


Share your play

After publishing, you can access your play at any time via your profile page. Depending on your privacy settings, other users can find it there, and we will publish it to the marketplace. If you mark the play as private, it will only be accessible to the outside world via a direct URL. From here, you can share your play on social media. You can also use the @playbooks/widgets package to embed and display it directly on your own website.


Track performance

Playbooks offers a built-in revenue share system that tracks unique download activity on your plays against the total network. The system runs on a daily basis with a 30-day lag. It records its findings for every play on the platform via the ledger. You can track this activity through both the public and private ledgers.


Getting paid

After updating the ledger, we automatically process transfers and payouts on a daily basis. To receive funds, you must complete the merchant setup and ensure your account is in good standing. Once verified, we automatically process a transfer for each play and aggregate those into a single payout. Alternatively, you can opt out of automatic payouts and manually request a withdrawal against your merchant balance at any time. All of these settings can be tracked and managed via your account dashboard. We will also send you a notification whenever a transaction occurs.