ShipIt, answered.

What is ShipIt?

ShipIt is a self-hosted, chat-driven IDE for running coding agents like Claude Code and Codex through your real engineering loop. Each session gets its own isolated Docker container with a live instance of your app to build, run, and test against, and you can run many agents in parallel, each on its own branch. The full GitHub loop — pull requests, CI checks, deploys, reviews, and issues — renders inline in the chat, and the whole thing is mobile-first with voice input and spoken summaries. ShipIt is open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

Is ShipIt free and open source?

Yes. ShipIt is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license, with the source available at github.com/nikzlabs/shipit. There is no paid tier or license fee for the software itself — you run it on your own infrastructure, so your only costs are the machine you host it on and the coding-agent subscription or API key you already have. Because it is Apache 2.0, you are free to self-host, modify, and extend it.

Can I self-host ShipIt? Does it run on my own server?

Yes — ShipIt is built to be self-hosted, and that is the intended way to run it. You can host it always-on on a VPS you own, or run it locally on your own machine with Docker. It is designed as a single-tenant tool: one person or a small trusted team running their own instance against their own repositories and infrastructure, rather than a shared cloud service. The VPS installer can optionally put it behind Cloudflare Zero Trust or Tailscale with no open inbound ports.

Which coding agents does ShipIt support?

ShipIt supports Claude Code and Codex today, and you pick which one to use per session. The backend is agent-agnostic, with more runtimes planned. You authenticate each agent with credentials you already have — a Claude Pro or Max subscription, a ChatGPT subscription, or an Anthropic or OpenAI API key — so ShipIt drives the agent without reselling you access to the model.

How is ShipIt different from Cursor, Devin, or cloud coding agents?

Unlike cloud-hosted coding tools, ShipIt runs on infrastructure you own and drives the agent you already pay for, so no vendor operates the platform your repository lives in. Where an editor like Cursor focuses on the file you're editing, ShipIt focuses on the whole loop around the agent — an isolated environment per session, a running app to test against, parallel non-colliding branches, and the full pull-request, CI, and deploy cycle inline in chat. And unlike a closed autonomous agent such as Devin, ShipIt is an open-source, self-hosted surface that brings your own agent rather than a proprietary one, giving you a transparent glass box instead of a black box.

What do I need to run ShipIt?

You need Docker (with Compose v2) and either a VPS to host it always-on or a local machine to run it on. You also need credentials for at least one supported agent — a Claude or Codex subscription, or an Anthropic or OpenAI API key. That is the whole list: ShipIt is distributed as Docker images, so there is no language runtime or database to install yourself, and a local install binds to localhost only.

Is my code and data private?

Yes, with one honest caveat. ShipIt is self-hosted and single-tenant, so your repositories are cloned and worked on inside infrastructure you own — no vendor platform sits in the middle holding your code. Your GitHub, agent, and issue-tracker tokens live in the orchestrator and are handed to a session only when it needs them, rather than sitting in the agent's container. Each session gets its own container, and agent traffic is default-deny, so a prompt-injected agent has no quiet route out. The caveat: the coding agent itself talks to Claude or OpenAI, so your prompts and the code it reads reach whichever provider you chose — self-hosting the platform isn't the same as running the model locally. One rule beyond that: don't expose a raw instance to the public internet; put it behind the access layer the installer sets up for you.

How do I install ShipIt?

Installing ShipIt takes one command. To try it on your laptop, run the local Docker setup script and ShipIt comes up at localhost:4123; to host it always-on, run the VPS provisioner on an Ubuntu host, which installs Docker, tunes the host, and can wire up Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale for you. Both paths are walked step by step on the install page.

Read the install guide →