Drag, Drop, Done: Files Come to Archyl Docs

We've all written that doc.

"See the attached diagram." Attached where? "Check the spec." Which spec? "I dropped the screenshot in Slack." Three weeks ago. In a thread. It's gone.

Documentation that points to files living somewhere else isn't documentation. It's a treasure map with half the clues torn off.

Today, that ends. Archyl docs can now hold their own files.

Drag. Drop. Done.

Open any documentation page and just… drop a file on it. Paste a screenshot straight from your clipboard. Or hit Attach file and pick a few.

Images embed right where you drop them — no Markdown gymnastics, no hunting for an image host. Everything else (PDFs, specs, exports, that one CSV someone always asks for) lands in a clean Attachments panel at the top of the page, where readers actually see it.

Screenshot of the bug? Inline. Architecture export? One click to download. The 80-page vendor PDF? Right there, next to the decision it justifies.

Any file. Really, any file.

PNGs, PDFs, Word docs, ZIPs, logs, configs — if it's a file, it's welcome. No "unsupported type" walls. No converting things to keep the uploader happy. Drop it and move on. (There's a sensible size limit so nobody tries to attach a Blu-ray — that's the only rule.)

Stored the way you'd want it stored

Your files don't bloat the database — they live in object storage. On Archyl Cloud, that's Google Cloud Storage: private buckets, encrypted at rest by default, nothing for you to set up. Self-hosting Archyl? Point it at whichever S3-compatible provider you run — GCS, Amazon S3, MinIO, Cloudflare R2 — your infrastructure, your call.

Either way the bucket stays private, and pages serve files through short-lived signed links, so confidential docs stay confidential and public ones just work.

In plain English: fast, private, and it scales past your biggest doc without breaking a sweat.

Why it matters

A C4 diagram shows how the system is shaped. An ADR captures why. But the proof — the screenshot, the benchmark, the signed contract, the napkin sketch that started it all — used to live everywhere except next to the words it belonged to.

Now the whole story sits in one place: the context, the decision, and the receipts to back them up.

Try it in ten seconds

Open a doc. Drag a file onto it. Watch it appear.

That's the entire tutorial.

Architecture documentation just stopped being all talk.

— Vincent