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Introduction

What Horus is, what you need, and the words you'll see in these docs.

Horus turns an Android phone into a small Linux computer. It runs a real Alpine Linux system inside the app, and gives you one-tap access to coding agents (Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode) or a plain shell. You don't need to root your phone or install Termux.

You can use Horus in two ways. They work fine separately, and you can mix them:

On the phone →Install the app, pick an agent, pick a project, and start working. No computer needed, ever.From your computer →Plug the phone in over USB and use it like a cloud VM: SSH in, forward ports, sync files.

What you need

An Android phone with a 64-bit ARM chip (called arm64-v8a). Almost every phone made since 2017 has one.
Android 7.0 or newer.
Internet on first launch. Horus downloads Alpine Linux, and later each agent the first time you open it.
An account with the agent you want to use. Claude Code needs an Anthropic account and Codex needs an OpenAI account. You sign in inside each agent, not in Horus.

The horus CLI is optional. It needs a Mac or Linux computer and a USB cable.

Words you'll see

New to some of this? Here's what the terms in these docs mean.

Terminal: A text window where you type commands and the computer answers in text. In Horus, every session is a terminal.
Shell (zsh): The program inside a terminal that reads your commands. Horus uses zsh.
Alpine Linux: A small, popular version of Linux. It's the operating system that runs inside Horus.
Coding agent: An AI assistant that works in a terminal. It can read your project, write code, and run commands, asking you first when it matters.
Project: A folder with your code in it. Horus keeps projects in /workspace/projects.
Git and GitHub: Git tracks changes to your code. GitHub is a website that stores Git projects (called repositories, or repos). Cloning means downloading a copy of one.
Session: One running terminal, such as a Claude Code conversation or a shell. Sessions keep running when you leave the app.
SSH: A secure way to open a terminal on another machine. The horus CLI uses it to reach your phone from your computer.
adb: Android Debug Bridge, Google's tool for talking to a phone over USB. The horus CLI uses it behind the scenes.

How it works, briefly

Android apps can't normally run a full Linux system. Horus uses a tool called PRoot to run Alpine Linux inside the app's own private storage. Your programs think they're on a normal Linux machine. Horus also has its own terminal built in, so it doesn't depend on any other app.