OpenClaude

OpenClaude is an open-source coding-agent CLI that runs in the terminal and connects to multiple cloud and local model providers. Supported backends include OpenAI-compatible APIs, Gemini, GitHub Models, Codex OAuth, Codex, Ollama, and Atomic Chat. It keeps a single workflow of prompts, tools, agents, MCP, slash commands, and streaming output regardless of which provider is in use.

Inside the session, /provider runs guided provider setup and saves profiles and credentials to .openclaude-profile.json, and /onboard-github handles GitHub Models onboarding. Provider settings can also come from exported environment variables (for example CLAUDE_CODE_USE_OPENAI, OPENAI_API_KEY, OPENAI_MODEL) or from openclaude --provider-env-file .env. Project .env files are not loaded automatically. The agent toolset covers bash, file tools, grep, glob, agents, tasks, MCP, and web tools. A bundled VS Code extension provides launch integration and theme support.

Session handling includes --resume <session-id> and --continue to pick up earlier conversations, plus --fork-session to branch history into a new session ID (conversation branching only, with no filesystem isolation or git worktree). Background sessions run as local child processes with openclaude --bg "prompt", optionally named with --name, and are managed with openclaude ps, openclaude logs <name> -f, and openclaude kill <name>. No daemon is started, and logs are stored under ~/.openclaude/bg-sessions/.

OpenClaude keeps its configuration separate in ~/.openclaude and ~/.openclaude.json, and does not read ~/.claude or require Claude Code. It needs Node.js 22 or later (Bun is only needed for source builds) and ripgrep installed on the system. It is aimed at developers who want a terminal coding agent that can switch between hosted and local models.

Installation

# via npm
npm install -g @gitlawb/openclaude@latest

# via AUR (Arch Linux)
paru -S openclaude