Get Crewship running on your hardware in 60 seconds, then create your first crew in under 5 minutes.
Crewship is a self-hosted runtime for AI coding agents. This page gets you from zero to a running agent in two passes: a 60-second smoke test that proves the runtime is alive on your hardware, then a 5-minute full setup that creates your first crew.
v0.1 beta — use the Claude Code adapter. Crewship ships scaffolds
for Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, Cursor, and Factory Droid, but only
Claude Code has production-tested streaming, MCP support, and prompt
scrubbers in this release. Pick Claude Code in the agent picker for
the supported path; the other adapters are marked Beta in-product
and have known gaps (Cursor MCP is upstream-broken in headless mode;
the Codex live-event stream parser is still a stub). See the README’s
“Beta status & limitations” section for the full matrix.
If you just want to see the dashboard come up on your machine, this is enough:
# 1. Install (binary, single command)curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/crewship-ai/crewship/main/scripts/install.sh | bash# 2. Start the runtime — embedded UI + SQLite + Go server, no Node.js, no external DBcrewship start# 3. Open the dashboardopen http://localhost:8080
That’s it. The runtime is now serving on your hardware. No agents have been created yet — that’s the next pass.
brew install crewship-ai/tap/crewshipcrewship version
# Verifies SHA-256 against signed checksums.txt; cosign signature# verified too when cosign is on PATH.curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/crewship-ai/crewship/main/scripts/install.sh | bashcrewship version
The short https://crewship.ai/install alias will point at this
script once the project website goes live; until then, fetch it
straight from the repo as shown.
git clone https://github.com/crewship-ai/crewship.gitcd crewship# NEXTAUTH_SECRET and ENCRYPTION_KEY are REQUIRED — set them in .env first.cp .env.example .env # then fill in the two secretsdocker compose -f docker/docker-compose.prod.yml up -d
The compose file declares both secrets with the ${VAR:?... is required}
form, so the stack refuses to start if either is unset. See the
Docker Compose install guide for the
full defaults table and the socket-proxy security model.
git clone https://github.com/crewship-ai/crewship.gitcd crewshipmake build# The binary is at ./crewship (repo root)./crewship version
For pinned versions, custom install directories, and air-gapped install paths see the full Install guide.
The server starts on http://localhost:8080 with an embedded UI and SQLite database.
2
Create the first admin user
Two first-class ways — pick the one that matches your deploy:
Browser
CLI / headless / CI
Open http://localhost:8080 — /login auto-redirects to /bootstrap on a fresh instance.
Fill in name + email + password (min 8 chars), click Continue to workspace setup.
Single-form bootstrap, no token to copy from anywhere.No rush by default. The bootstrap page stays open until you create the first admin — the empty user table is the gate, so take your time (the same first-run pattern as GitLab/Grafana). Once an admin exists, /bootstrap is closed for good.
For Ansible, Terraform, GitOps, or any provisioning flow where launching a browser isn’t an option:
Prompts for a password (or accept --password-stdin from a vault). init POSTs /api/v1/bootstrap, creates the admin row + default workspace + OWNER membership, and returns a CLI token your CI stashes for subsequent calls.
Hardening for public instances (opt-in). If you expose a fresh instance to the internet before bootstrapping it, set CREWSHIP_BOOTSTRAP_WINDOW=5m (any Go duration) to arm a finite deploy-race window: /bootstrap accepts requests only for that interval after startup, then returns 410 Bootstrap window expired — restart the server to open a new one so a scanner can’t grab the admin account. Both the browser form and crewship init POST the same /api/v1/bootstrap endpoint and share the window; for unattended provisioning that lands minutes-to-hours after boot, restart the server immediately before the call so the window is fresh. Left unset (the default), bootstrap simply stays open until the first admin exists.
3
Log in via CLI
crewship login
Authenticates your CLI session against the server.
4
Select a workspace (multi-workspace setups)
crewship init creates your first workspace and marks it as the default — you can skip this step on a single-workspace install. If you belong to more than one workspace, pick which one the CLI targets for every subsequent command:
crewship workspace list# SLUG NAME ID ROLE# acme * Acme Corp ws_abc… OWNER# side-proj Side Project ws_def… ADMINcrewship workspace use side-proj# ✓ Default workspace set to: side-proj
The selection is written to ~/.crewship/cli-config.yaml and used by every subsequent CLI call. Override per-command with --workspace <slug> if needed.
5
Check system health
crewship doctor
Verifies Docker is running and all runtime dependencies are met. The sidecar binary is embedded in the crewship binary at build time, so no separate pre-build step is required.
6
(Optional) Opt out of crash reporting
Crewship v0.1 beta enables anonymous crash reporting by default. To opt out before any data leaves your machine:
crewship telemetry off
Full details — what is and isn’t sent, routing to your own Sentry, defense-in-depth scrubbing — in the Telemetry guide.
The key is validated against the provider API, then encrypted with AES-256-GCM before storage.
--type API_KEY is for plain provider API keys (sk-ant-api...).
If you instead have a Claude Code OAuth token from a flat-rate
subscription (sk-ant-oat...), use --type AI_CLI_TOKEN — the
runtime injects the two differently, and mixing them up breaks
agent authentication.
Use --value-stdin to pipe the key securely. Using --value directly exposes the key in the process list.
