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Quick Start

Set up your first Claude Code task workflow in under 10 minutes.

Text Guide

Quick Start

FlightDesk adds the team workflow around Claude Code: shared task visibility, preview environments, and QA handoff. This guide gets you from zero to your first task.

What You'll Need

  • A GitHub account with at least one repository
  • Claude Code installed and working on your machine
  • Node.js 18+ (for the CLI)

Step 1: Create Your Account

Go to flightdesk.dev/register and sign up with your email or GitHub account. Email verification is required before you can log in.

Once verified, you'll land inside your organization dashboard.

Step 2: Connect GitHub

FlightDesk uses a GitHub App for secure, short-lived access to your repositories.

  1. Go to Settings → Organization → Integrations
  2. On the GitHub card, click Connect
  3. Authorize the FlightDesk app on GitHub
  4. Select which repositories to grant access to

FlightDesk will immediately start receiving PR webhooks from those repositories. No manual webhook setup required.

Step 3: Create a Project

Projects link a GitHub repository to FlightDesk.

  1. Go to Projects → New Project
  2. Select your connected GitHub repository
  3. Give the project a name
  4. Save

Optionally configure preview environments at this step — you can always do it later in project settings.

Step 4: Create an API Token

The CLI and the API both authenticate with a personal API token.

  1. Go to Settings → Personal → API Tokens
  2. Click Create Token, give it a name like "MacBook Pro CLI"
  3. Copy the token — it is shown once

The same page shows the Claude Desktop MCP configuration, if you want an AI assistant reading your FlightDesk data as well. See MCP Setup.

Step 5: Install and Configure the CLI

The CLI connects your terminal to FlightDesk. The package is called flightdesk:

npm install -g flightdesk

Then point it at your account and paste the token when prompted:

flightdesk init

Confirm it worked:

flightdesk whoami

That prints the user the token resolves to, the active organization, and where it read the credential from. Configuration lives in ~/.flightdeskrc.

Step 6: Create Your First Task

  1. Go to Tasks → New Task
  2. Select your project
  3. Write a title and a description of the work
  4. Click Create Task

Or from the terminal:

flightdesk task create -p <project-id> -t "Fix the login redirect loop"

Step 7: How the Work Moves

Every task moves through the same phases:

Backlog → Ready → Plan → Plan review → Build → Waiting → QA → Merge → (Release) → Done

What varies is where a person is needed, set per project under Project Settings → Orchestration:

  • Plan review — a person approves the plan before Build, or a finished plan goes straight to it
  • QA — a person checks the work on the preview before Merge, or green CI is enough
  • Releases — staged (merged work waits at Release until someone ships it) or continuous (every merge is its own release, and merged means Done)

And whether FlightDesk drives the work at all. With orchestration on, FlightDesk dispatches an agent at each step and owns the phase. With it off, the phase follows the pull request and QA — open the task, watch the branch, the PR, the checks and the preview URL land on it, and move it yourself.

If you build the work locally, hand the pull request over and let the pipeline take it from there:

flightdesk task handoff --pr 412

Next Steps

Connect GitHub
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