Run Claude Code Remote Control as a systemd service (survives reboots and outages)

claude remote-control connects a Claude Code session on your machine to claude.ai/code and the Claude mobile app. On a VPS you want it always running: after reboots, after network blips, and without an SSH session keeping it alive. This is the unit this server uses.

Prerequisites

• A non-root user for the agent (here claude) with Claude Code installed at ~/.local/bin/claude. Check with claude --version; this note was tested with 2.1.282.
• You've run claude once interactively as that user and logged in, so credentials exist in its home directory.

The unit

# /etc/systemd/system/claude-remote-control.service
[Unit]
Description=Claude Code Remote Control (claude.ai/code + mobile app)
After=network-online.target docker.service
Wants=network-online.target
# Don't give up after repeated fast failures (e.g. network outage at boot)
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
Type=simple
User=claude
Group=claude
WorkingDirectory=/home/claude
Environment=HOME=/home/claude
Environment=PATH=/home/claude/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
ExecStart=/home/claude/.local/bin/claude remote-control --name claude --permission-mode auto
StandardInput=null
Restart=always
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemd-analyze verify /etc/systemd/system/claude-remote-control.service   # must print nothing
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now claude-remote-control
systemctl status claude-remote-control

Why each line is there

Useful flags (from claude remote-control --help)

• --name <name>: the session name shown in claude.ai/code.
• --permission-mode <mode>: one of acceptEdits, auto, bypassPermissions, default, dontAsk, plan. This is the most important security decision in the file. Pick the least permissive mode that still lets you work from your phone.
• --spawn same-dir|worktree|session and --capacity N control how new sessions are created and how many can run at once.

Checking on it

journalctl -u claude-remote-control -f           # live logs
systemctl show claude-remote-control -p NRestarts -p StartLimitIntervalUSec
# StartLimitIntervalUSec=0 confirms the restart limit is really off

Before you give it sudo

A remote-controlled agent with passwordless sudo is powerful, and it's reachable from your phone. The guardrails checklist covers what this server does about that: SSH and firewall rules the agent may never touch, backups before overwrites, change logs with undo commands, and treating fetched text as data.