Setup: Two Layers That Have to Agree

Studio is not a single install. Your app gets SDKs and routes. Contentstack gets a project record. Neither half renders a page alone, and most setup failures are the two halves disagreeing about an environment, a locale, or a canvas path.

The two layers of a Studio install: your app provides the SDKs, the canvas route and the catch-all route; the Studio project provides the stack link, environment, language and canvas URL.

Layer	Lives in	You configure
Your app	Your codebase	Delivery SDK, Live Preview, Studio SDK, a canvas route, a catch-all route
Your Studio project	app.contentstack.com	The linked stack, environment, language, and the canvas URL pointing back at your app

The canvas URL is the seam. It is a relative path on the project, resolved against the environment’s base URL at render time, so the same project can preview against local, staging and production without being edited.

Do It With a Skill

install-studio covers the first layer: it installs the three SDKs, validates your credentials before writing anything, and wires the initializer. It adds no routes.

curl -fsSL https://studio-documentation.contentstackapps.com/install.sh | sh

The second layer, the project record, is mostly browser work. configure-studio walks environment, language and Canvas URL in one pass.

Before Anything Else

Check that Studio is enabled for your organization. It is an app-switcher check that takes seconds, and it rules out the single most common cause of a blank canvas.

Working Through This Chapter

Group	Covers
Prerequisites	The stack-side things that must exist first: API key, delivery token, preview token, environment
Install the SDKs	The three packages, what each one is responsible for, and the order they initialize in
Create the project	The project record, and the browser-only steps no script can do for you
Rendering and routes	The canvas route, the catch-all, and the CSR-or-SSR decision that precedes both

Finish with Verify your setup, which tests the layers from the Delivery SDK upward so you repair the lowest failing one first.

Reference, Not a Starting Point

This chapter is exhaustive by design. If you are installing Studio for the first time, Quickstart 1 walks both layers end to end in one linear pass, and you can return here when you need depth on a specific piece.