Portable — use Claude Code from your phone

Portable runs on your computer and phone, letting you use Claude Code from anywhere. Run it on your own PC with one command (portable); your repos, chats, and data live locally; and you drive it from the Portable mobile app by scanning a QR code.

Portable uses your own Claude subscription — it costs nothing extra.

100% free, open source, and fully private — we do not see any of your data or AI chats.

Install

bun install -g @volter-ai/portable.dev
# or
npm install -g @volter-ai/portable.dev
# or
curl -fsSL https://portable.dev/install.sh | bash

Requires Bun ≥ 1.2 (both the CLI and the local api run under Bun; the install scripts set it up for you).

Quickstart

portable        # → prints a pairing QR in your terminal

Then install the mobile app, sign in, and scan the QR:

• App Store
• Google Play

In the happy path there is nothing to configure: the launcher discovers the Claude and GitHub credentials already on your machine (the claude CLI's login, gh, your git credential helper), provisions cloudflared and Chromium on first run, and pairs purely from the QR. Re-opening the app later reconnects automatically — no re-scan needed.

Commands

| Command | What it does | | -------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | portable | Default. Auto-links the current dir (only if it's a git repo inside your home dir), then starts the runtime and shows the pairing QR. Runs until Ctrl-C. | | portable connect | Same as bare portable (the canonical "start the runtime" name). portable start is a back-compat alias. | | portable link | Register the current directory as a Portable project so it shows up in the app (git repo required). | | portable unlink | Remove the current directory from your Portable projects. | | portable --version | Print the installed CLI version. | | portable help | Show help (--help / -h). |

Flags:

• --debug / -d — streams the api logs to your terminal (useful to watch your phone connect) and prints the QR once instead of the live screen.
• --ngrok — publishes your PC through ngrok instead of cloudflared (or set PORTABLE_TUNNEL_PROVIDER=ngrok). ngrok must already be installed and authenticated (ngrok config add-authtoken <token> or NGROK_AUTHTOKEN); the launcher fails fast rather than silently falling back to cloudflared. Handy when a network blocks *.trycloudflare.com.

How it works

Portable is local-first. The backend runs on your PC, bound to 127.0.0.1, storing everything in local SQLite — no Docker, no Postgres, no cloud database. The launcher publishes it through a Cloudflare Quick Tunnel and registers that URL with a public relay; the mobile app talks to a stable address on the relay, which reverse-proxies to your PC. The relay never holds your AI credential or your data — it only forwards traffic. AI calls go direct to api.anthropic.com with your own Claude account.

To keep everything on infrastructure you control, you can self-host the relay and point the CLI at it with PORTABLE_RELAY_URL. Prefer a different tunnel? portable --ngrok fronts your PC with ngrok instead of Cloudflare (see Flags above).

Links

• Source & docs: github.com/volter-ai/portable.dev
• Patch notes: CHANGELOG.md
• Configuration reference (.env), credentials, troubleshooting: the repository README

License

Apache-2.0