/home/workdir/artifacts/index.html: How to Get Your File Out

You asked Claude to build a website, it worked for a while, and then it announced something like "I've saved your site to /home/workdir/artifacts/index.html". So you open Finder or File Explorer, search for workdir, and find nothing. The file is real, but it is not where you think it is. Here is what that path actually means, why you will never find it on your own disk, and the three ways to get your site out of there and onto a live URL.

What is /home/workdir/artifacts/index.html?

/home/workdir/artifacts/index.html is a file path inside Claude's code-execution sandbox. When Claude writes code or generates files for you, it often does so in a temporary Linux container that Anthropic runs on their servers. That container has its own filesystem, its own home directory, and its own working folder, which is where paths like /home/workdir/ or /home/user/ come from. When Claude writes a file there, it prints the path so it can refer to it later in the conversation.

The important part: that Linux container is not your Mac and not your PC. It exists only for your chat session, and it is wiped when the session ends. The path is accurate inside the sandbox and meaningless outside it. This is why searching your own disk finds nothing, and why the same path shows up for thousands of different users. Everyone's sandbox uses the same folder layout.

Why you cannot open the file on your computer

The container's filesystem is not mounted anywhere on your machine. There is no network share, no synced folder, no hidden directory where /home/workdir/ secretly lives. Your browser is talking to claude.ai over HTTPS; the sandbox sits behind Anthropic's infrastructure and never touches your local disk.

So the fix is never "find the file". The fix is always "export the content". The HTML that Claude wrote exists in two recoverable forms: as the artifact shown in your chat, and as text Claude can print or re-send. As long as your conversation is still open, nothing is lost. You just need to move the content across the boundary, from Claude's sandbox to somewhere you control.

Three ways to get the file out of Claude's sandbox

1. Download the artifact from the chat UI. If Claude presented the site as an artifact (the preview panel on the right), open that panel and use the download control to save the file to your computer. This gives you a real local index.html you can open, edit, or upload anywhere. It is the simplest path when the whole site is one file.

2. Copy the code view. Every artifact has a code view alongside the preview. Switch to it, copy everything, paste it into a text editor, and save it as index.html. This also works when Claude only printed the code in the chat without creating an artifact. It is manual, but it always works, and for a single-page site it takes under a minute.

3. Skip the file entirely and deploy straight from the sandbox. This is the option most people do not know exists. Connect the VibeDeploy MCP server to Claude, then tell it "deploy this". Claude pushes the site from its sandbox directly to real hosting and replies with a live HTTPS URL. No download, no drag-and-drop, no worrying about where /home/workdir/ is. The file goes from a temporary container to a permanent public address in one step. The full setup is covered in the Claude artifacts deploy guide.

If your goal is a link you can send to someone, option 3 gets you there fastest. Options 1 and 2 get you a local copy first, which is useful if you want to inspect or edit the code yourself.

How to run a Claude artifact locally

Once you have saved the file to your machine, a plain HTML artifact needs nothing special. Double-click index.html and it opens in your browser. Styles and scripts that live inside the same file work immediately.

Some artifacts are not plain HTML, though. If Claude built a React component as a .tsx file with import statements at the top, your browser cannot run that directly. It needs a build step: create a small Vite project (or ask Claude to scaffold one), drop the component in, run npm install and npm run build, and preview the generated dist/ folder. If that sounds like more than you signed up for, ask Claude to "rebuild this as a single self-contained HTML file" instead. It usually can.

Either way, remember what a local copy is: a site visible only to you. Opening index.html on your laptop does not put anything on the internet. For that, you need hosting.

What "Publish artifact" in Claude does (and does not do)

Claude has a built-in publish button that gives your artifact a shareable claude.ai URL. It is a genuinely useful way to push your ideas to the web in seconds, and for showing a friend a prototype it is often all you need.

Know its limits before you treat it as hosting, though. The published page lives on Anthropic's domain with a visible Created-with-Claude frame, you cannot attach a custom domain, you cannot control the page title, meta tags, or social preview, there are no analytics, and Anthropic can unpublish content on its platform at any time. It is a sharing feature, not a home for a business site, a portfolio, or anything you would print on a business card.

What is MCP in Claude artifacts?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. In plain language, it is a standard way to give Claude extra abilities by connecting it to outside services. A connected service exposes tools, and Claude can call those tools during your conversation the same way it runs code.

For deployment, the flow looks like this: you connect a hosting provider's MCP server once, and from then on Claude has a "deploy" tool. When you say "put this site online", Claude calls that tool, uploads the files it just generated, and reads back the resulting live URL, all inside the chat. You never handle the files at all. We explain the concept in depth in What is MCP hosting.

From sandbox path to a live URL on your own domain

Here is the whole journey, condensed:

1. Get the site out of the sandbox: download the artifact, copy the code, or connect the VibeDeploy MCP server and tell Claude "deploy this".
2. If you exported manually, drag your index.html (or built folder) into a new site on VibeDeploy. You get a live https://yourname.vibedeploy.be address in about 30 seconds.
3. Add your own domain in the dashboard and point the DNS records it shows you. SSL is issued automatically, usually within a minute.
4. Keep iterating in Claude: with MCP connected, every "update the site" request can end with a fresh deploy to the same URL.

The step-by-step version, including the custom domain part, is in Claude artifact to custom domain. The 14-day trial needs no credit card, so you can take today's sandbox file all the way to a real domain for free. Details on the pricing page.

/home/workdir/artifacts/index.html is not lost. It was just never on your computer to begin with. Export it, or better, have Claude deploy it, and the path stops mattering entirely.