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An agent reaches tmphost.io in two ways: the file tool of the MCP server, or the tmphost CLI. Both upload, download, list and link files in folders that expire on their own.

LLM-friendly version (Markdown): https://tmphost.io/docs.md

01MCP toolsThe file tool at https://mcp.tmphost.io/mcp: every argument, every action, with real calls and results.
02CLIThe tmphost command: install, sign in, upload a file or a whole directory, with real output.

CLI or MCP?

Guideline

If the agent can run shell commands, use the CLI. tmphost file upload reads files from local paths and prints only their URLs, and tmphost file download -o writes to a local path, so a 5 MB PDF or a whole dist/ folder costs the context a few lines. Through MCP, every byte of a file is a tool argument the model has to write out, and every byte of a download comes back into its context.

Without a shell, use MCP, and send text as text. For .html, .css, .js, .md, .json, .svg and other UTF-8 files, pass format: "textContent": the content goes as is. The default, base64Content, makes the payload a third larger and turns readable text into opaque characters. Keep base64Content for binary files such as images and PDFs.

Way	What passes through the model's context	Use it for
CLI	The command, then the folder id and URLs	Any file, any size, whole directories
MCP textContent	The file's text, as is	Small text files the agent just wrote: HTML, CSS, JS, Markdown, JSON
MCP base64Content	The file as base64: 4 characters for every 3 bytes	Small binary files, when there is no shell

The same upload, both ways

A 300 KB report.html through the CLI is one short command:

Shell

$ tmphost file upload report.html --ttl 2h

Through MCP, the same file is 300 KB of textContent in the tool call, or about 400 KB as base64Content. Either way the model writes it out token by token.

Concepts

Folders and TTL

Every upload goes into a folder. A new folder gets a TTL (default 30 minutes, set with ttl or --ttl, such as 2h); when it runs out, the folder and its files are deleted and their URLs stop working. The maximum TTL is in GET https://app.tmphost.io/api/v1/limits.

Folder ids and URLs

An upload returns the folder's id (such as k7q2m9xa) and the file's public url (such as https://k7q2m9xa.file.tmphost.io/index.html). Pass the id back to add files to that folder. The folder URL serves a page when index.html sits at its root. Take URLs from the responses instead of building them by hand.

Paths

A file can live in directories inside its folder (path, such as site/css), at most 5 levels deep. Paths use /, with no . or .. segments and no backslashes.

Updates

Uploading to a path that already holds a file replaces it in place: its URL stays the same and the folder keeps its expiry.

Credits

An account gets 250 credits every 30 days. Each file written costs 1 credit per started MB of its size per started 30 minutes of the folder's remaining lifetime: a 1.01 MB file in a folder with an hour left costs 2 × 2 = 4 credits.

Sign-in

Both the MCP server and the CLI sign in with OAuth through app.tmphost.io in the browser, once. The CLI saves its tokens and refreshes them; MCP clients that support OAuth do the same.