Crewship

Run AI coding agents on your own hardware — each in a real, isolated container,
with a company-grade control plane around the whole fleet.

Status: open beta. APIs and data models are still moving — pin a tag
or commit SHA if you ship to production. What's ready vs. WIP
spells out the exact state of every piece.

What is Crewship?

Crewship gives every crew of agents its own real Linux container — a fully
sandboxed machine where the agent runs and can install literally anything:
system packages, databases, build tools, whole workspaces. You choose what
drives it — a local model via Ollama, OpenCode, or Claude Code — so
you are never locked to one vendor or forced to push your code into someone
else's cloud.

Around that runtime, Crewship is the control plane a team actually needs to run
agents for real: missions where a lead plans a task breakdown and agents
work it, scheduled routines, human-filed issues, role-based access
control for a whole company, complete audit logs of every action, and a
governance layer (Keeper) that watches what agents do. Everything — code,
data, conversations, memory, the audit trail — stays on your hardware and packs
into encrypted backups that capture not just memory but the agents' whole
working state, so nothing an agent builds is ever lost.

Crewship models a crew like a small company, so the structure is obvious to
anyone: a Lead agent directs the work and can hire specialists on demand,
while member Agents do the tasks. Every participant — human and agent — has
their own chat, their own inbox, and a place in the org.

You bring the keys — or run fully local. Crewship keeps them off disk, off the
wire, and out of the agent process.

Quickstart

brew install crewship-ai/tap/crewship   # macOS / Linux (other installs below)
crewship doctor                         # checks container runtime, ports, deps
crewship start                          # boots the daemon on :8080
open http://localhost:8080              # 3-step wizard: workspace → crew → key → launch

You need a container runtime (Docker, Podman, Colima, OrbStack, or Apple
Containers). crewship doctor autodetects one and tells you exactly what's
missing. Want demo data to poke at? crewship seed.

Prefer to wire everything from the terminal instead of the wizard? Jump to
First crew — CLI walkthrough. Full install
options (signed installer, Docker Compose, air-gapped) are under
Install.

Install a crew in one click

A recipe is a curated crew bundled with the credentials and MCP servers it
needs — installed atomically in a single transaction, so a half-installed
crew never exists.

crewship recipe list                    # browse the bundled crews
crewship recipe install <name>          # crew + credentials + MCP servers, one shot

What's in the box

Labels: ✅ stable · 🟡 early (works, contract may still shift) ·
🚧 WIP (scaffolded, not yet end-to-end). Each item links to its guide.

1 · The runtime

• ✅ Real Linux containers — one per crew: isolated network, non-root UID,
  read-only root, cap-drop ALL. Install, build, and run anything Linux
  supports. → devcontainers
• ✅ Pick your engine — drive a crew with a local model via Ollama,
  OpenCode, or Claude Code. No API key required if you run local.
  → CLI adapters
• ✅ Skills — author or import a SKILL.md playbook and attach it to one
  agent or a whole crew. → skills
• ✅ Manifests — declare your whole org (workspace, crews, agents, skills,
  integrations, issues, projects) as files and crewship apply it. GitOps for
  your agent fleet. → manifests

2 · Working with agents (the "company")

• ✅ Crews with Lead/Agent roles + hiring — a lead plans and delegates; hire
  ephemeral specialists on demand. → orchestration
  · ephemeral agents
• ✅ Missions — a lead plans a task breakdown, agents work the tasks, and the
  mission moves through a tracked lifecycle you can start, resume, restart, or
  clone. → API: missions
• ✅ Per-agent chat — every agent has its own conversation, resumable across
  sessions. → chat sessions
• ✅ Issue tracker + triage — humans file issues; triage rules auto-route
  each one to the right crew, agent, and project. Full backlog with projects,
  milestones, recurring issues, and saved views. → API: issues
  · triage
• 🟡 Routines — scheduled, AI-authored workflows: step DAGs, cron +
  HMAC-signed webhooks, human-in-the-loop waitpoints, immutable version history.
  → routines
• ✅ Inbox + notifications — messages, mentions, and events land in a
  per-user inbox with configurable notification channels. → inbox
  · notifications

3 · Control plane & governance

• ✅ Role-based access control — OWNER › ADMIN › MANAGER › MEMBER › VIEWER,
  enforced on every route. → auth
• ✅ Approvals — risky tool calls pause for human sign-off; the agent waits.
  (Harbormaster) → harbormaster
• ✅ Keeper — optional rule-based gate + watchdog on what agents pull and do,
  with snitch-to-admin alerts. → keeper
• ✅ Cost ledger — every LLM call priced with token counts; per-workspace
  budgets enforced. (Paymaster) → paymaster
• ✅ Input guard — argument- and prompt-injection guardrails on LLM inputs.
  (Lookout) → lookout
• ✅ Audit journal — append-only, searchable (FTS5), exportable stream of
  every LLM call, tool use, and decision. (Crew Journal) → crew journal
• ✅ Replay & regression — replay a mission deterministically or diff two
  runs for regressions in tool success, cost, and step signature.
  (Quartermaster) → API: eval
• ✅ Checkpoints & fork — snapshot a mission's state, advisory-restore it, or
  fork a fresh mission from any point. (Cartographer) → API: checkpoints

4 · Your data, your keys

• ✅ Encrypted credential vault — AES-256-GCM at rest, piped over a Unix
  socket to a sidecar that injects per-request, never to the agent process.
  → credentials · encryption at rest
• ✅ Outbound scrubber — credential patterns redacted from agent output
  before it leaves the container.
• ✅ Agent memory — file-first memory that recalls across sessions, plus
  crew-shared facts with cross-crew isolation. → agent memory
• ✅ Encrypted backups — Age-encrypted bundles capture a whole workspace or
  crew — code, data, conversations, journal, memory — so nothing agents create
  disappears. → backup
• 🟡 Integrations — connect agents to external tools via MCP and Composio.
  → integrations

5 · Interfaces

• ✅ Web UI — activity feed, per-crew dashboards, approvals queue,
  integrations page, and a bottom command dock. → activity
• ✅ Full CLI — every workflow, scriptable and headless. → CLI overview
• ✅ Single binary — the Next.js UI is embedded in the Go server. No Node.js
  at runtime, no separate services to deploy.

Everything, from your terminal

Crewship exposes one versioned REST surface under /api/v1/ (five auth methods,
RFC 7807 errors, WebSocket + webhooks for real-time and inbound triggers) — and
every API resource has a matching crewship command. API↔CLI parity is a
project rule, not an afterthought: anything the platform can do, you can do from
a shell script or hand to an agent to drive safely.

crewship crew list --format json | jq '.[].slug'
crewship ask --agent viktor "scaffold a Go HTTP service with a /health endpoint"
crewship mission run "ship the auth refactor" --crew eng
crewship approvals list                 # what's waiting on a human
crewship cost --workspace demo          # token + dollar ledger

Full reference: docs/cli/overview.mdx and
docs/api-reference/overview.mdx. The docs are
large — 60+ guides and 40+ API pages under docs/, rendered at
docs.crewship.ai (coming soon).

What's ready vs. WIP

This is an open beta. The pieces marked ✅ above have been used by the
maintainer in production-shaped workloads; 🟡 and 🚧 are still being shaped.

• Claude Code is the production-tested adapter. Ollama and OpenCode run
  today; Codex / Gemini / Cursor / Factory Droid have adapter scaffolds but not
  yet the integration tests and tuning to call production-ready.
• SQLite for now. Runs on modernc.org/sqlite (single binary, WAL, no extra
  services). PostgreSQL is on the roadmap.
• Single host. One instance manages many crews on its own host; multi-host
  clustering is future work.
• APIs may break across minor bumps. Patch bumps inside a minor are
  backwards-compatible. Pin a tag for production.
• Telemetry is opt-in on stable builds. Prerelease/dev builds send anonymous
  crash reports to help a small team fix bugs; the onboarding wizard asks
  explicitly and your answer sticks (crewship telemetry on|off).
  → telemetry

Found a beta-blocker? Open an issue — the beta-blocker label gets
priority triage.

Install

Three supported paths — full details in docs/guides/install.

# macOS / Linux — Homebrew
brew install crewship-ai/tap/crewship

# Any Unix — signed installer (fetch the script direct from the repo)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/crewship-ai/crewship/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

# Self-hosted — Docker Compose (builds from source; brokers all Docker API
# access through a docker-socket-proxy sidecar)
git clone https://github.com/crewship-ai/crewship.git
cd crewship
cp .env.example .env   # then set NEXTAUTH_SECRET + ENCRYPTION_KEY (both required)
docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.prod.yml up -d

Homebrew / curl installs then start with crewship start (the Compose stack
already boots the server). Defaults: HTTP on :8080, SQLite at
~/.crewship/crewship.db; override with CREWSHIP_PORT / --db file:/path.
Platform gotchas (macOS Gatekeeper, Linux linger, Windows SmartScreen) are in
troubleshooting.

First crew — CLI walkthrough

The web wizard is the easy path. To wire the same setup from your terminal — to
script it, dotfile it, or run headless — every step has a subcommand:

crewship init --email [email protected] --name "You"   # first admin on an empty DB; returns a CLI token
crewship login --token <token-from-init>             # persists to ~/.crewship/cli-config.yaml
crewship crew create --name "Engineering" --slug eng --icon code --color blue
read -rs -p "Anthropic API key: " KEY && \
  printf '%s' "$KEY" | crewship credential create \
    --name anthropic-key --type API_KEY --provider ANTHROPIC --value-stdin && \
  unset KEY
crewship agent create --name "Viktor" --slug viktor --crew eng --role LEAD \
  --cli-adapter CLAUDE_CODE --tool-profile CODING --system-prompt @prompts/lead.md
crewship credential assign anthropic-key viktor --env-var-name ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
crewship ask --agent viktor "scaffold a Go HTTP service with a /health endpoint"

Full CLI reference: docs/cli/overview.mdx. Pair an
already-running server with a fresh CLI install via
cli-pairing — the same device-code flow Claude
Code itself uses.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/crewship-ai/crewship.git
cd crewship
pnpm install          # frontend deps (pnpm required)
./dev.sh start        # SQLite, hot-reload, Go :8080 + Next.js :3001

./dev.sh start auto-generates NEXTAUTH_SECRET and ENCRYPTION_KEY into
~/.crewship/secrets.env on first boot — no .env.local editing for the happy
path. Other subcommands: stop, restart, status, seed, nuke, logs.

Single-binary production build:

make build            # pnpm build → cp -r out web/out → go build -o crewship
./crewship start

make build is end-to-end. Don't run pnpm build then go build directly
— the cp -r out web/out step in between keeps the embedded UI in sync.

Stack

Prisma is TypeScript-types only. All schema changes go through
internal/database/migrate.go. Never run prisma migrate.

Verify a change

go test ./... && go vet ./...        # backend
pnpm test && pnpm exec tsc --noEmit  # frontend

Contributing

PRs welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for workflow and commit
conventions; open an issue first to discuss larger changes. Security: see
SECURITY.md — do not file public issues for vulnerabilities.
Community conduct: CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md (Contributor
Covenant 2.1).

Community & links

• Docs: docs/ in this repo; hosted docs.crewship.ai coming soon
• Discord: community help + showcase (invite on crewship.ai)
• Reddit: r/Crewship
• X / Twitter: @crewshipai · Bluesky: @crewship.ai
• YouTube: @crewshipai
• GitHub Discussions: crewship-ai/crewship/discussions

License

Apache License 2.0 — free to use, modify, distribute.

Copyright 2025-2026 Unify Technology s.r.o.