Chef Migration Guide
Convex Chef has had a good run but we’re in the process of replacing it with a new incarnation better suited to long-term application development on Convex. Your Chef projects will continue running but your Chef development flow will be impacted in the meantime. We apologize for the inconvenience! Read on for instructions on how to continue developing your existing Chef projects.
Continuing to develop on Chef projects
If you’re a new user we recommend getting started on Convex directly via a coding agent or tutorial. If you have an existing Chef app however and don’t want to wait for the Chef successor, we recommend exporting your project for local development.
Chef projects are fully fledged Convex projects and can be maintained either by hand or via a coding agent such as OpenCode or Claude Code. Your data will still be intact and your Convex project will continue to run as normal.
Download your project
Go to chef.convex.dev and navigate to your chat. Click the download code button in the Chef UI to get a zip file of your project.
Unzip the file and put the folder in your desired location. We recommend renaming the folder to the name of your app for convenience.
Open the project in your IDE
Open the folder in the IDE of your choice (VS Code, Cursor, IntelliJ, etc.). From here you can use any coding agent — like OpenCode or Claude Code — to continue developing your project.
Install dependencies
Open the terminal, cd into your app folder, and install all dependencies:
cd ~/<app folder>
npm i
Run your app
Run the following command to start your app, and set up Convex if you haven’t already:
npm run dev
Follow any instructions to log in to Convex from your machine. This will run
your Chef app locally — you will need to deploy using the CLI to get your app on
the convex.app domain (see Deploying to convex.app
below).
You have now taken over from Chef for development of this app. Chef doesn't have the ability to re-import a project or track any progress from outside it. Going back to this project on Chef will cause conflicts in your project.
Happy building! Reach out to Convex support if you have any questions.
Deploying to convex.app
The Convex platform doesn’t natively support hosting frontend code, just the backend for your application. We typically recommend using a hosting provider like Netlify or Vercel for hosting.
If you’re a regular Chef developer however, you will have been able to host your
app frontend on a *.convex.app domain and may want to keep using this. You can
continue pushing changes to this same hosted frontend via a special CLI tool.
Detailed CLI instructions for pushing to your existing *.convex.app frontend
are coming soon.
Note that this tool will only allow you to push to existing Chef projects. If you’d love to see built-in hosting as a generally available Convex service, feel free to put in a request at ship.convex.dev.
Advanced: Running Chef locally
The Chef codebase is open source and available to run locally or to fork and modify. Projects created by open source Chef will still run on the Convex cloud with the same guarantees as regular Convex projects.
See the Running Locally section at github.com/get-convex/chef for instructions.