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Overview

ChatGPT Apps are a new way for ChatGPT users to interact with your services directly from the ChatGPT interface. In practice, ChatGPT Apps are MCP servers exposing tools and MCP resources linking to UI components. Alpic allows you to host complete ChatGPT Apps with zero-configuration, by hosting both the MCP server and the UI assets used by your ChatGPT App.
To learn more in detail about how OpenAI ChatGPT Apps work, read our blog post: Inside OpenAI’s Apps SDK: How to Build Interactive ChatGPT Apps with MCP.

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Building your ChatGPT App

Alpic provides a minimal starter kit in TypeScript to help you bootstrap your ChatGPT App. To get started, fork the Alpic Apps SDK starter kit or simply use the following link to clone the repository and deploy it on Alpic: Deploy on Alpic
Alpic supports ChatGPT apps written in any language and framework. You can of course use your favorite framework to build your ChatGPT App.

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Hosting your ChatGPT App assets on Alpic

Alpic provides the /assets endpoint on all deployed servers. This allows you to serve static files like images, JavaScript, and CSS files used by your ChatGPT App. The /assets endpoint is populated in the following way:
  • We look for assets in the /assets folder at the project root location (your repository root by default)
  • We look for assets built during deployment and stored in the /assets folder in the build output directory specified in your Settings. By default, this is the dist folder, so we look for assets in the dist/assets folder by default
  • If both folders contain assets, a merge is done, with priority given to freshly built assets in case of conflict
You can access your assets in your MCP server tools and resources code by using the relative path /assets.
Note that OpenAI heavily caches ChatGPT Apps assets. In development mode, you can go to Settings > Apps & Connectors, then select your app and click on “Refresh” to clear the cache.