OpenClaude

// Overview

OpenClaude is an open-source coding-agent CLI that talks to cloud and local model providers from a single terminal-first workflow — prompts, tools, agents, MCP, slash commands and streaming output stay the same whichever backend is behind them. Rather than picking a provider for you, it ships guided setup: run `/provider` inside the CLI and it walks you through configuration and saves a reusable profile.

The provider table is unusually wide. Any OpenAI-compatible `/v1` server works, which covers OpenAI, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Groq, Mistral and LM Studio among others, and on top of that sit first-class routes for Gemini, GitHub Models (via an `/onboard-github` flow), Codex and Codex OAuth, Fireworks AI, Cloudflare Workers AI, Bedrock, Vertex and Foundry for the Anthropic family, a set of aggregator gateways, and local inference through Ollama or Atomic Chat with no API key at all.

The agent itself does the usual tool-driven work — bash, file read/write/edit, grep, glob, sub-agents, tasks, MCP and slash commands — with multi-step tool loops and streaming token output. Around that are conveniences worth knowing: conversations can be resumed by session id or forked into a new one, long prompts can run detached as background sessions you list, tail and kill, a PageRank-ranked repo map can be injected into context, `WebSearch` falls back to DuckDuckGo for non-Anthropic models (with Firecrawl as the supported alternative), and the whole thing can run headless as a gRPC service for CI pipelines or custom UIs. OpenClaude keeps its own config under `~/.openclaude` and deliberately does not read `~/.claude`, project `.claude/` directories or `CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR`, so it does not require Claude Code to be installed.

// What it does

• One CLI across OpenAI-compatible APIs, Gemini, GitHub Models, Codex/Codex OAuth, Fireworks, Cloudflare Workers AI, Bedrock/Vertex/Foundry, Ollama and more
• Guided provider setup and saved profiles through `/provider`, stored in `.openclaude-profile.json`
• Tool-driven coding workflows: bash, file read/write/edit, grep, glob, sub-agents, tasks, MCP and slash commands, with streaming output and multi-step tool loops
• Resume a conversation by session id or continue the most recent one in the directory, with `--fork-session` to branch history instead of reusing the transcript
• Background sessions as local child processes — `--bg` to start, `ps`, `logs -f` and `kill` to manage, with terminal outcomes recorded under the config directory
• Per-agent provider and model routing via `agentModels` / `agentRouting`, plus `maxSteps` caps on sub-agent tool steps
• A repo map ranked by PageRank importance that can be auto-injected into context and inspected with `/repomap`
• Headless gRPC server with bidirectional streaming for embedding the agent in other applications or CI/CD pipelines

// Getting started

OpenClaude needs Node.js 22 or newer for npm installs and at runtime; Bun is only needed for source builds and local development. It does not automatically load project .env files — use `/provider`, or pass `--provider-env-file` explicitly.

npm install -g @gitlawb/openclaude@latest

# Arch Linux
paru -S openclaude

openclaude

# inside OpenClaude:
/provider          # guided provider setup and saved profiles
/onboard-github    # GitHub Models onboarding

openclaude --resume <session-id>
openclaude --continue
openclaude --resume <session-id> --fork-session

openclaude --bg "fix failing tests"
openclaude --bg --name auth-refactor "refactor auth middleware"
openclaude ps
openclaude logs auth-refactor -f
openclaude kill auth-refactor

export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your-key-here

npm run dev:grpc

Commands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.

// When to use it

• Keep one coding-agent workflow while switching between a hosted API, an aggregator gateway and a local Ollama model
• Run a long refactor detached from your terminal and check on it with `ps` and `logs -f`
• Route cheap sub-agents to a small model and hard reasoning to a large one from a single settings file
• Embed an agentic coding loop into CI or a custom UI through the headless gRPC server

// How OpenClaude compares

OpenClaude alongside other open-source autonomous coding agents tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.