Quick start with formae Cloud

The formae MCP plugin has been renamed from formae-mcp to formae. If you installed formae-mcp, uninstall it and install formae before continuing. Follow the migration steps.

With formae Cloud the agent runs for you, so there is no agent to deploy and nothing to keep running. You install the formae plugin into the coding assistant you already use, and then you describe what you want. You will sign in, connect a cloud account, and create a real resource. Every step is a sentence you say to your assistant. You will not run a formae command at any point, and you do not need to know that a formae binary exists: your assistant installs and drives it on your behalf.

Running the agent yourself instead? The Quick start with an AI assistant covers the self-hosted path, where you install formae and start the agent locally.

Install the assistant plugin

Claude Code
Codex
Cursor
OpenCode

/plugin marketplace add platform-engineering-labs/formae-marketplace
/plugin install formae@formae-marketplace

Restart Claude Code so it picks the plugin up.

codex plugin marketplace add platform-engineering-labs/formae-marketplace
codex plugin add formae@formae-marketplace

Clone the repository, link the skills, then point Cursor at its launcher in ~/.cursor/mcp.json:

git clone https://github.com/platform-engineering-labs/formae-mcp.git ~/.cursor/formae
mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills
ln -s ~/.cursor/formae/skills ~/.agents/skills/formae

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "formae": {
      "command": "/home/you/.cursor/formae/scripts/start-mcp.sh"
    }
  }
}

Use an absolute path.

Clone the repository, link the skills, then register the server in opencode.json. See AI coding assistants for the full block.

This installs the formae MCP and its skills. On first launch it downloads the prebuilt pieces it needs to talk to your installation.

Ask your assistant:

set up formae for me

It signs you in to formae Cloud. If a browser cannot open where you are working, such as in a container or over SSH, it switches to a device flow and gives you a verification URL and a code to enter there, which you can open on any device that has a browser.If you do not have an organization yet, your assistant sends you to console.formae.ai to create one and provision an agent, then picks the conversation back up. Provisioning takes a few minutes.When it finishes you have an agent running in formae Cloud and a profile pointing at it.

Connect a cloud account, then manage something in it

The rest differs by cloud: what you need to hand over, how much access formae is granted, and what the smallest real resource looks like. Pick yours.

AWS
GCP
Azure

Connect. Tell your assistant connect my AWS account. It will never infer which account: provisioning trust into the wrong one is not a mistake a default should be able to make.If you have AWS credentials available, it lists your local profiles with the account each one resolves to and asks you to pick, so the choice is about credentials and the account they reach rather than an id typed from memory. It then provisions the trust directly. If you have none, it asks for the 12-digit account id and hands you a CloudFormation quick-create link; you deploy the stack under your own console session and give it the role it produced. Either way no long-lived key is created.Target. Connecting an account establishes trust and nothing more: until a target exists there is nowhere for formae to create or discover anything. A target is where resources live, and for AWS that is the account paired with a region. Your assistant asks for a label and a region, then writes and applies the declaration.Create something real.

Create an S3 bucket in my-target

Bucket names are globally unique across all of AWS, so your assistant asks you for one, and anything generic is long gone.

Connect. Tell your assistant connect my GCP project. It asks for the project id rather than inferring one from gcloud’s active configuration, for the same reason it does on AWS. There is no console template for GCP, so this is a single step rather than a hand-off and back.The access granted is broad: editor on the project, plus the ability to manage its IAM. Your assistant tells you before anything is created. Read it.If the agent is running somewhere other than the machine you are sitting at, your assistant offers a Google sign-in rather than assuming a browser can open where the agent is.Target. A target is where resources live, and for GCP that is the project paired with a region. Your assistant asks for a label and a region, then writes and applies the declaration.Create something real.

Create a storage bucket in my-target

Two things bite here. Bucket names are globally unique across all of Google Cloud. And the location must be a single region such as us-central1: formae does not accept the multi-region US or EU spellings, and will refuse the declaration rather than create something you did not mean.If a resource fails with an API-disabled error, that is the Cloud Storage API not being enabled on the project. Enable it and ask again.

Connect. Tell your assistant connect my Azure subscription. It asks for the subscription id rather than inferring one from az’s active configuration.With az credentials available this is a single step. Without them your assistant relays the exact az login command for you to run, or hands you a subscription-scoped ARM template that opens prefilled in the portal.The access granted is Contributor plus User Access Administrator, which together are close to owner. Your assistant tells you before anything is created.If your account is a guest in another directory, or spans several tenants, your assistant will ask for the tenant. Otherwise it is derived and you are never asked.Target. A target is where resources live, and for Azure that is the subscription alone. Unlike AWS and GCP there is no region on an Azure target: location belongs to each resource instead.Create something real.

Create a storage account in my-target

A storage account lives in a resource group, so your assistant declares the group too and formae creates them in order. You asked for the thing you wanted; the rest comes along.Storage account names are stricter than most: 3 to 24 characters, lowercase letters and digits only, no hyphens.

Whichever cloud you chose, your assistant writes the forma, simulates it so you can see what would change, and applies it once you agree. There is no command that creates a target, in the same way there is no command that creates a bucket. Everything in formae is created by declaring it and applying.

See what was already there

Discovery has been running against your target since you created it. Ask:

What unmanaged resources do you see in my-target?

These are resources that existed before formae. They are visible but not managed, and you can bring any of them under management by importing them into a forma.

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Reference

Quick start with formae Cloud