Unpeel

Your multiplexer for always-on terminal AI agents.

File based and local-first. No account required for local use. Native on macOS and in the terminal, built on Ghostty, with E2E-encrypted iPhone remote.

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Unpeel runs your CLI agents — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Pi, OpenCode, Cursor Agent, Grok, Kimi, and anything else that lives in a terminal — as always-on hosted sessions on hardware you own, steerable from a Mac, a terminal, or your phone. It is a self-hosted alternative to cloud agent platforms: same launch-from-anywhere, get-notified, review-and-steer loop, while canonical session data stays on your machines. The optional Link relay sees ciphertext only and never stores session content.

Get it

Mac app — unpeel.com/download/mac

CLI / headless (Mac or Linux)

curl -fsSL https://unpeel.com/install.sh | sh

That installs unpeel (the terminal UI) and unpeel-host. The TUI is best in Ghostty — the same terminal engine Unpeel's own surfaces use — but any modern terminal works. On a server, the TUI is the host: it runs sessions, pairs your phone, and serves the same remote protocol the Mac app does.

iPhone / iPad — unpeel.com/ios

Why Unpeel

• Always-on agents. Every session runs in its own tiny host process, outside any window. Close the app, quit the terminal, reboot the UI — the agent keeps working, output is journaled to disk, and everything reattaches. Restart re-runs the agent with the right resume flag so the conversation continues.
• One fleet, every CLI. Provider-aware launch, resume, busy/idle/needs- attention state (driven by real hook integrations, not output guessing), auto-titling, pinning, projects, and git worktrees for parallel agents on one repo. Arbitrary shell commands work too.
• Steer it from your phone. The iPhone app is a real terminal over your sessions — pair with a QR code, get push notifications when an agent needs you, type back. Off-LAN traffic rides an end-to-end-encrypted relay; the relay can't read a byte of it.
• Host anywhere, control from anywhere. Macs and Linux boxes are hosts. iPhone controllers connect directly or through Link; terminal controllers use SSH. The native Mac Host picker is still a development preview. Every transport carries the same narrow Host contract.
• Agents with superpowers. Sessions get a built-in MCP server: inspect and message sibling sessions (with a real trust boundary), drive an isolated real browser per session, with screenshots saved as reviewable artifacts. Computer Use is temporarily kept out of production builds while its macOS permissions move behind a stronger security boundary.
• Terminal-first, never an IDE. GPU-rendered Ghostty terminals with links, images, and ligatures. No diff viewers, no file trees, no editor panes: agents are for everything, not just code, and the review surface is the terminal, transcripts, and screenshots.
• Yours. All state lives in ~/.unpeel/ as plain files. No account, no telemetry-driven cloud, no server product. The optional paid piece — Unpeel Link — is just the operated rendezvous/relay/push service for reaching your own machines from anywhere; everything local and direct is free.

Open source

Everything you run is intended to be open, under the MIT license (the Unpeel name and icon are trademarks — see TRADEMARK.md): the Mac app, the iOS app, the terminal UI, the session backend, the relay, the protocols, and the docs. The only closed component is the backend of the operated Unpeel Link service (accounts, seats, entitlements, rendezvous) — you pay for infrastructure we run, never for a checkbox in a binary you compiled yourself. The full boundary, reasoning, and pre-publication checklist live in docs/plans/open-source.md.

Repo layout

path	what it is
apps/native	The macOS app (Swift + libghostty) and the unpeel-attach terminal client
apps/ios	The iPhone/iPad controller app
apps/shared	Swift package: pairing, remote-control, and relay E2E protocol shared by both Apple clients
crates/unpeel-core	The session backend: PTY hosting, provider integrations, hooks, MCP, transcripts
crates/unpeel-host	The standalone host binary (session host, MCP server, remote server)
crates/unpeel-tui	unpeel — the terminal UI and headless host
apps/relay	The Link relay worker: E2E-opaque transport + push
apps/website	unpeel.com (site, docs, purchase UI)
apps/releases	Download/update distribution worker (Sparkle appcasts, installer)

Each directory has its own README; AGENTS.md is the deep map of how the session system fits together.

How sessions survive

Each session is a separate unpeel-host process owning the PTY. It writes output.bin (append-only journal), serves session.sock (control), and persists manifest.json under ~/.unpeel/app-sessions/<id>/. Clients — Mac app, TUI, phone — are attachments over that state, so any of them can restart without touching the agent. App-level state (projects, presets, pins, theme) is one JSON file: ~/.unpeel/app-state.json.

Development

With Bun and Rust installed, fetch the JavaScript workspace dependencies:

bun install

CLI / TUI

Build both terminal-side binaries, then run the development TUI from the repository root:

cargo build --manifest-path crates/Cargo.toml -p unpeel-tui -p unpeel-host
crates/target/debug/unpeel

unpeel-host must be built alongside unpeel: the TUI launches that sibling binary to own its hosted sessions. By default, the development TUI shares the normal state in ~/.unpeel. To test against isolated disposable state instead:

UNPEEL_HOME=/tmp/unpeel-dev crates/target/debug/unpeel

Other development targets

bun run dev:native      # macOS app: builds, signs stably, launches dist/Unpeel.app
bun run dev:website     # unpeel.com dev server
cargo test --manifest-path crates/Cargo.toml   # backend tests

Use bun run dev:native rather than a bare swift run: it signs with a stable local identity so macOS keeps trusting the app's Keychain access across rebuilds. See AGENTS.md ▸ "Local Development Builds".

The TUI has a real-PTY integration suite: crates/unpeel-tui/tests/run.sh.

Releases

The Mac app and CLI share one version but have separate publication steps. bun run release -- --channel <ch> --build <n> builds, signs, notarizes, and publishes the Sparkle-updatable Mac app; bun run release:cli publishes the Mac/Linux CLI tarballs. Artifacts live on Cloudflare R2 behind unpeel.com. Details: docs/agents/releases.md.