Running Claude Code Locally - Free and Private Setup Guide
Running Claude Code Locally - Free and Private Setup Guide
Claude Code runs entirely on your machine. Your conversations, file edits, tool outputs, and command history stay local. Nothing gets uploaded to a server unless you explicitly choose to. This matters more than most people realize.
What Local-First Actually Means
When you run Claude Code in your terminal, the tool itself executes locally. It reads your files from disk, runs commands in your shell, and stores conversation history on your filesystem. The model inference still happens via API - your prompts go to Anthropic's servers for processing - but the workspace context, file contents, and tool outputs remain on your device.
This is a meaningful privacy boundary. Your codebase, your credentials files, your local databases - none of that gets persisted on anyone else's infrastructure. The model sees what you show it in the conversation, processes it, and returns a response. The working state lives on your machine.
Adding Cross-Session Memory
The default setup is stateless between sessions. Close the terminal and the context is gone. But you can add a local knowledge graph that persists across sessions - your preferences, project patterns, common commands, and workflow history.
Tools like Hindsight or a local SQLite-backed memory store give the agent continuity. It remembers that you prefer tabs over spaces, that your deploy command is a specific make target, that your test database runs on port 5433 instead of 5432. Small details that add up to a dramatically better experience over time.
The Setup
Install Claude Code from the official source. Point it at your project directory. That is genuinely it for the base setup. For memory persistence, add an MCP server that stores key-value pairs locally - there are several open source options that take five minutes to configure.
The result is a coding agent that knows your patterns, respects your privacy, and costs nothing beyond the API calls you choose to make.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.