Requirements & components

C3 control spans a hub, the hosts running agents, and one or more clients.

The hub machine (one, any machine you own)

The hub is a lightweight NATS relay. A Raspberry Pi, a home server, or a small VPS all work.

• The c3sync CLI — the hub is provisioned and run by c3sync hub commands, even if you never use C3Sync itself. Beta participants receive the appropriate signed release instructions with access.

• Or C3 Desktop on Linux, which can drive the installed CLI through a guided local or remote-SSH setup.

• Two reachable ports: 4222 (TLS 1.3, bridges and C3Sync) and 8443 (pinned WebSocket, phones). Reachable can mean your LAN, a VPN/overlay network, or the public internet — your choice.

Each controlled host (as many as you like)

Any machine whose agents you want to steer from the phone:

• Herdr 0.7.5+ — the terminal workspace manager that hosts your agents. Herdr is a separate project, installed separately (review its AGPL/commercial licensing); C3 never bundles it.

• C3 Bridge (c3bridge) — installed via the C3 backend package:

  shCopy

  npm install -g @naarang/ccc

• Your coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, …) running inside Herdr panes, as usual.

• Network access to the hub's port 4222.

Qualified bridge platforms in the current beta: Linux x64 and Linux ARM64. macOS and Windows binaries are built but still being qualified.

Your phone

• C3 Mobile beta access for iOS or Android. Android is the qualified beta platform; iOS is being qualified. Join the waitlist for the current access path.
• A camera, for scanning enrollment and pairing QR codes.
• Network access to the hub's port 8443.

Your desktop (optional)

• C3 Desktop on Linux. It can replace most manual setup steps and can enroll as another control client.
• The same network access to your hub and bridges described above.
• See the dedicated C3 Desktop requirements.

What talks to what

The phone and your machines never connect to each other directly — everything routes through your hub as ciphertext.

NOTE — > There is no C3 cloud. If your hub is off, the app can't reach your machines — and neither can anyone else.

Next: set up your hub.