claustrum

A tiny, dependency-light Go daemon that hosts a remote Claude Code session over SSH —
a local CLI-version manager + process supervisor + JSON-RPC multiplexer (with a replay
buffer) over a Unix socket. An independent, clean-room implementation you can run yourself.

Independent & unaffiliated. claustrum is a clean-room implementation. It is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Anthropic. "Claude", "Claude Code", and "Claude Desktop" are trademarks of Anthropic, PBC, used here only to describe interoperability. See NOTICE.

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What it is

When you drive a remote Claude Code session over SSH, a small Go daemon runs on the remote host. It isn't a network relay — it's local plumbing:

• CLI-version manager — downloads/verifies/extracts the pinned claude CLI, prunes old versions.
• Process supervisor — spawns and manages the agent (and any MCP-server) child processes, owning their stdio.
• JSON-RPC multiplexer — speaks newline-delimited JSON-RPC 2.0 over an AF_UNIX socket, fanning many clients/streams over one connection, with a replay buffer so a late or reconnecting client can catch up.

claustrum is a from-scratch, behaviorally-compatible implementation of that daemon, so it can be used independently — e.g. as a building block for self-hosted tooling like clauster. It is validated to produce byte-identical JSON-RPC frames for every method (see Validation).

Status: stable (v1.0+). The JSON-RPC/process/file/git surface is complete and validated; the CLI-version installer is implemented and behavior-checked. No telemetry, ever.

Install / build

Requires Go 1.25+. Dependencies: github.com/klauspost/compress (zstd) and golang.org/x/sys (Windows Job Object teardown — only compiled into Windows builds).

# build the native binary
make build          # -> ./claustrum   (CGO off, -trimpath, stripped)

# or cross-build all six targets into ./dist/
make all            # linux/darwin/windows × amd64/arm64

# or straight go
go build -o claustrum .
go install github.com/schubydoo/claustrum@latest

claustrum -version prints claustrum <git-sha> (built <iso8601>) (the SHA/time come from the embedded VCS build info).

Usage

One binary, mode-switched by flag:

claustrum -serve   -socket <path> -token-file <path>   # self-daemonize, run the RPC server
claustrum -bridge  -socket <path>                       # dumb stdio<->socket relay (what SSH attaches)
claustrum -stop    -socket <path>                       # ask a running daemon to shut down
claustrum -install -cli-dir <dir> -cli-version <v> [-cli-url <url> -cli-checksum <sha256>] [-cli-zst <file>] [-cli-keep <n>]
claustrum -version

Start a daemon and talk to it

# 1. a private socket + auth token
D=$(mktemp -d); printf '%s' "$(uuidgen)" > "$D/token"

# 2. start the daemon (self-daemonizes; reads + unlinks the token file)
claustrum -serve -socket "$D/rpc.sock" -token-file "$D/token" &

# 3. speak JSON-RPC over the socket (auth is in-band, per request)
TOK=$(cat "$D/token" 2>/dev/null || true)   # already unlinked; use the value you generated
printf '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"server.ping","auth":"%s"}\n' "$TOK" \
  | socat - UNIX-CONNECT:"$D/rpc.sock"
# -> {"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":{"pong":true}}

# 4. enumerate everything the daemon implements
printf '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"server.capabilities","auth":"%s"}\n' "$TOK" \
  | socat - UNIX-CONNECT:"$D/rpc.sock"

# 5. shut it down
claustrum -stop -socket "$D/rpc.sock"   # reads CLAUDE_RPC_TOKEN for auth

More worked examples — spawning a process and reading its base64 output stream, reattaching to catch up via the replay buffer, extracting a plugin tarball — are in docs/PROTOCOL.md and docs/EXAMPLES.md.

How it works

• Transport: NDJSON over AF_UNIX SOCK_STREAM (mode 0600); one persistent connection; requests dispatched concurrently.
• Auth: every request carries an in-band "auth":"<token>"; the daemon's token comes from -token-file (read once, then unlinked) or -token-fd (read from an open descriptor — never touches disk); the -bridge/-stop clients use CLAUDE_RPC_TOKEN.
• 19 methods across server.*, files.*, git.*, process.* (server.capabilities self-describes them).
• process.* is the core: a client supplies its own id on spawn; the daemon streams id-less {"type":"stream",…} notifications (base64 stdout/stderr + an exit), buffers them, and replays on reattach{fromSeq}. This is how both the agent and MCP servers are hosted.
• Operational knobs (claustrum-only, all off the wire): CLAUSTRUM_LOG_LEVEL quiets the leveled stderr diagnostics, -metrics-addr opts into a local Prometheus /metrics endpoint (no listener exists without it), and -keep-children (CT-2, POSIX-only) makes a graceful shutdown leave spawned children running so they survive a daemon restart (off by default — shutdown kills them, unchanged; ignored with a warning on Windows).
• Protocol extensions (claustrum-only, opt-in — additions, not part of the reference contract it mimics): process.spawn / process.reattach accept "wantPid":true, which adds pid + startTime to the result for PID-reuse / orphan detection (CT-1). These are pure additions — a client that doesn't opt in sees byte-identical frames, so the guarantee below is unaffected. See docs/PROTOCOL.md and the divergence catalog.

Full details: docs/PROTOCOL.md and docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Platforms

Cross-compiles to linux, macOS (darwin), and windows on amd64 and arm64 (6 targets). It's a static CGO_ENABLED=0 Go binary. OS-specific behavior (daemonize, process groups on Unix / Job Objects on Windows for whole-tree kill, login-shell PATH extraction) is isolated in *_unix.go / *_windows.go files; the JSON-RPC surface is identical everywhere.

Validation

claustrum is checked against a reference daemon with a request battery that exercises every method, error path, and the full process lifecycle, then diffs normalized frames. Current status: byte-identical across all methods, plus a behavior-identical -install path. The harness lives in scratch/ (local, not published).

An in-repo test suite (run in CI on every PR, on linux, macOS, and Windows) locks the same contract without the reference binary: a socket-integration battery boots the daemon and asserts every method's frames against committed golden fixtures, alongside unit tests for the install pipeline and the bridge/stop clients (~80% statement coverage). See docs/UPSTREAM-TRACKING.md for how compatibility is kept in sync over time.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Issues and PRs welcome.

Security

See SECURITY.md for the threat model and how to report a vulnerability privately.

License

Apache License 2.0 · © 2026 Schuby. See NOTICE for the independence & trademark statement.