Quickstart

Five steps, each linking to its full page. You need one machine you control (Linux x86-64/arm64 or Apple-silicon macOS), tmux, and ideally one agent CLI installed; the plain Terminal harness needs nothing, so you can even start with zero.

1. Install and start the control plane

On the machine that will run the server:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/subshell-ai/subshell/main/install-server.sh | bash

It downloads the subshell-server binary for your platform from the newest GitHub release, verifies the published .sha256 digest before making the file executable, installs it to ~/.local/bin/subshell-server, and runs subshell-server init. The one question that decides your setup (run in the background and start at login, default yes) is answered there; everything else you can accept with Enter. Prefer a window and a button? That's the Subshell Server desktop app.

The command ends by printing the address:

Open http://localhost:3080/setup in a browser to create the admin account.

2. Create the admin account, promptly

Open that /setup URL now. Until the first account exists the setup endpoints are public (that is what lets you create it), so on a LAN this is a race, and whoever walks through first becomes the admin. The wizard's first screen is Create Your Account; after it, the Networking step is optional (skipping costs nothing; every choice there is reachable again under Settings). Full walkthrough: Your First Subshell.

3. Confirm tmux and an agent

The wizard's Add an Agent screen pins a tmux row above the list of agent CLIs it can see on the server's machine (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Hermes Agent, pi). A missing tmux gets an Install button where the command needs no password (Homebrew on macOS); where it would need sudo, the screen shows you the command to run instead. A missing agent CLI gets the same: Install runs the vendor's own install command on this machine. And Terminal (a plain shell pane) is always available with nothing installed. See Agents and Installing agent CLIs.

4. Launch your first subshell

The wizard's last screen is a launch form already filled in: the server's own machine (its node is named "Server" by default), a detected agent, and a starting directory. Pick a project folder, press Start. That's it: no preset exists on a fresh instance and none is needed; a launch needs only an agent and a folder. The page that opens is the live pane: type into it, close the tab, reopen from anywhere; the agent keeps running.

5. Open it from a second device

On a laptop or tablet, browse to an address the server accepts sign-ins from (the loopback URL from step 1 is only this machine's own spelling, and the wizard's Network step or Server settings add the LAN or mesh addresses) and sign in: the same live pane, yours to type into. On a phone, open the Subshell for Mobile dialog in the sidebar: it offers the addresses this server accepts sign-ins from, with a QR code, and installing to the Home Screen makes it a standalone app with notifications. Mobile and Tablet covers the split; Networking & Addresses explains what makes an address reachable, including the mesh options under Server.

Once this works and you want another machine running agents, that is what Nodes is for.