This Mac as a host

Set Up This Mac… turns the machine you are sitting at into a host. It is the shortest path to a working Offsite, and it is the one most people should start with.

About the name

“This Mac” means the Mac the app is running on right now. Once it is a host it appears in your host list under its own machine name, like every other host — so from your iPhone you never see “This Mac”, you see the machine. The phrase only exists on the setup screen, where “this” is unambiguous.

What setup does

The setup screen runs a health check, then installs the host components into ~/.offsite. Each row is either already green or carries the button that fixes it:

Row	Checks	If it is red
Developer Tools	Apple Command Line Tools — the real git and python3	Install… starts Apple’s own installer; setup waits and continues by itself
Homebrew & tmux	sessions run inside tmux	one click copies the official Homebrew command and opens Terminal; tmux itself is installed for you
Offsite Host	the host runtime in ~/.offsite	installed for you
Update Server	get.offsite.sh is reachable and the build is published	check your network, then Check Again
Agents	at least one agent CLI is installed and on PATH	install one yourself, then Refresh Agents
macOS Prompts	nothing — it announces which system dialogs are coming	—

What it does not touch

This is the part worth stating plainly, because most remote-development tools need all of it:

• No Remote Login. Setting up This Mac does not enable System Settings › Sharing › Remote Login and does not open port 22.
• No SSH configuration. No keys in ~/.ssh, no authorized_keys edits, no sshd_config.
• No admin password — unless you opt into always reachable or the sleep helper, which say so before they ask.
• No account. There is no sign-up and no user record anywhere.
• No global tmux config. Offsite never writes ~/.tmux.conf and never installs tmux plugins; its sessions run on their own tmux sockets with their own config file.

Offsite reaches the local host through its own embedded agent, over the same SSH-backed RPC path it uses for every other host, so this Mac behaves like any other host in your fleet.

After setup

The host appears in the sidebar. From there:

• The host’s ⋯ menu → Show iPhone QR starts pairing — see Pairing devices.
• The host row carries its version and an Update button — see Updating Offsite.
• The connection pill names the path in use, which for This Mac is loopback.

Details

• Host components install to ~/.offsite: bin/ (agent and helpers), sessions/, state.db, workspaces.json, devices.json, settings.json, tmux/. Full map: What Offsite puts on your machine.
• The health check is a preflight report; each row maps to a component the bootstrap service probes independently, so a red row never blocks the rows below it.
• Agent CLI detection reports three states per tool — found, not found, or not verified. “Not verified” means the binary exists but did not answer a version probe; that is usually a CLI that wants a login first.
• Host artifacts are published for Apple Silicon (macos-arm64).