claudaris

Claudaris (klaw-DAR-iss): A moveable docker container for Claude code. using Arch btw.

Configure

Run the interactive wizard and answer its prompts (press enter to keep a default):

./claudaris config

It writes NAME, DATA_DIR, and WORKSPACE_DIR to .env (gitignored — every user keeps their own), which every other command sources. NAME should be something unique to you (e.g. chris-claude) if more than one person is running a container from this same repo checkout. DATA_DIR defaults to /data/$NAME; WORKSPACE_DIR (the host dir mounted as /projects in the container) defaults to /home/$USER/projects. config/configure can be re-run any time to update .env.

Build container

As root run build (always --no-cache --pull, so it picks up the latest Claude Code release):

sudo ./claudaris build

Start the container

Make sure the volumes are as you like and start the container.

sudo ./claudaris start

Connect to the container

sudo ./claudaris connect

Stop and remove the container

sudo ./claudaris remove

(aliases: stop, rm)

Optional: SSH access to other nodes

To let the container SSH out to other machines, create $DATA_DIR/ssh on the host and populate it with keys/config before running ./claudaris start. If present, it's bind-mounted read-only to /root/.ssh. It's off by default.

Notes

Claude Code is installed at build time under /root, so a rebuild always picks up the latest release. Two files are bind-mounted individually to survive that: ~/.claude/.credentials.json (the OAuth token) and ~/.claude.json (account/onboarding state — Claude Code checks this too, so persisting the token alone isn't enough to avoid a re-login prompt after a rebuild). ./claudaris start seeds both from empty on the host the first time it runs. Logging in once then survives rebuilds without carrying the CLI binary or the rest of ~/.claude (settings, history, projects, caches) along with it.

The container also stops itself once its tmux session ends (any shell exit — Ctrl+D, exit, crash) instead of running forever, and there's no Docker restart policy — ./claudaris connect and ./claudaris start both bring it back up automatically if you find it stopped.

.bashrc and bash_aliases are both bind-mounted as single files so they can be tweaked per-host (e.g. a coworker importing their own aliases) without a rebuild. ./claudaris start seeds them into $DATA_DIR/home/.bashrc and $DATA_DIR/home/bash_aliases from files/bashrc and files/bash_aliases the first time it runs, without overwriting later edits. Anything that needs to survive regardless (PATH, zoxide, git identity) lives in /etc/... inside the image instead of under /root.

The container is started with --hostname "$NAME", so the prompt reads root@claudaris (or whatever you set NAME to via ./claudaris config) instead of a random container ID.