Connecting Claude

Restful doesn’t resell Claude. You bring your own Pro or Max subscription, and your machine authenticates to it the same way Claude Code would on a laptop — via an OAuth handoff to claude.ai.

This only has to happen once. The token persists on your machine across reboots, updates, and your own terminal sessions.

The flow

1. Open the browser console from your dashboard (or SSH in).
2. Run claude /login.
3. Claude Code prints a URL. Click it (or copy-paste it into a browser on any device).
4. You’ll land on claude.ai. If you’re not signed in, sign in there with your usual Pro/Max account.
5. The page shows a confirmation code. Copy it.
6. Paste the code back at the prompt in your console.
7. Claude Code confirms the connection and you’re done.

Verifying

Run claude /status to confirm the connection and see which plan it’s authenticated against. Pro and Max both work. Free won’t — rate limits will choke you within seconds of starting a real session.

Bring an API key instead

If you’d rather pay per token via the Anthropic API instead of via a Pro/Max subscription, that works too:

echo 'export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Then start claude as normal. It’ll use the API key automatically and bypass the subscription path.

Rotating

If you ever need to log out and re-auth (different Claude account, revoked session, etc.), run:

claude /logout
claude /login

The token is stored under ~/.claude/ and disappears when you log out. Your project files, command history, and any in-flight tmux sessions are untouched.

Privacy

The token only ever lives on your machine. Restful’s control plane never sees it, never proxies your Claude API calls, and has no visibility into your conversations or what Claude is building for you. Heartbeats from the agent only ship versions + service-health status — never request bodies or model context.