Single Machine

Once you've installed Argus, supervising Claude Code on one machine takes a few commands. This page explains what's happening underneath — the node and how discovery works — so you can run Argus the way that fits you.

Nodes

A node is the background process that does the real work: it discovers Claude Code sessions, controls their tmux panes, and serves a local API (a unix socket) that the TUI talks to. You don't talk to the node directly — the TUI does.

There are two ways a local node comes to life:

• Ephemeral — running argus with no node already up offers to spawn one. It's tied to that TUI and dies when you quit.

  argus          # open the TUI (can spawn an ephemeral node if none is running)

• Persistent — argus start runs a node in the foreground that keeps going regardless of whether a TUI is open.

  argus start    # run a persistent node

Discovery

Argus finds Claude Code sessions by scanning your tmux panes — there's no per-session setup. Just run claude inside a tmux session and it shows up:

tmux new -s work
cd ~/code/my-project
claude

Keep an always-on node

Running argus spawns an ephemeral node that dies when you quit. To keep Argus watching your sessions even with no TUI open — so status is current the moment you reopen it — run a persistent node:

argus start

Leave it running (in its own tmux window, a systemd/launchd service, etc.), and open the TUI against it whenever you want with argus.