Chirp — remote help

Download it, run it, send your chirp.

Remote help between two people who trust each other. Nothing to install, no account, and nothing happens on your screen until you press Allow.

usechirp.app · How Chirp works · Wiki · Roadmap

[!IMPORTANT] Chirp is not ready to use yet. Two Chirps find each other, the consent prompt works, and an allowed session shows the other screen and takes input, but it has not been tried between two real machines yet and there is nothing to download. Status says exactly where it stands.

How it works

1. Run Chirp. It is one program, the same for everyone: no installer, no account, no technician edition. It shows your chirp — a short code — and a link you can send instead.
2. Send your chirp to someone you trust. Read them the code, or send them the link. They type the code into their own Chirp, or paste the link. Every use of the link makes a fresh single-use code, so a code that leaks after it was used opens nothing.
3. You decide. Your Chirp asks you, on your own screen, who is asking and for what, and you choose what they can do: see your screen only, or also use your mouse and keyboard, or send and receive files. Nothing starts until you press Allow.

Whoever types the code controls; whoever shared it decides. Chirp is for one-off help — a relative, a friend, a customer on the phone — not for managing a fleet: nothing stays installed to be managed. How Chirp works is the full description.

A prompt that is easy to say no to

Remote-support tools are a favourite of phone scammers, and a friendly prompt does their work for them. Chirp's consent prompt is plain on purpose, and built so that an unexpected request is easy to decline:

• Decline has the focus, and Allow only becomes clickable after three seconds, so neither a reflexive Enter nor a stray click lets anyone in.
• The caller's name is shown as a claim — They say they're… — because Chirp cannot check names, and it is cleaned so it cannot pose as a line of the prompt.
• Every permission is spelled out, and each is a switch: only See your screen starts on, and Allow lets in what is on and nothing else, so a hurried Allow gives away the picture alone. The person being helped turns on the mouse and keyboard, or files, only if the call needs them, and can take either back from the session bar.
• A fixed warning says that banks, government agencies and big tech companies never ask for this.
• Closing the prompt, or letting it run out of time, declines.

What you can count on

Three commitments bind what Chirp may become. They are constraints, not features to be traded away:

• No feature gates. Screen sharing, input control, multi-monitor, file transfer and clipboard sync are the free core, permanently.
• Explicit consent. A session cannot start without the end user agreeing to it on their own machine, in a prompt Chirp controls.
• Self-hostable with zero restrictions. Anyone may run their own signalling and relay infrastructure. Any hosted service is a convenience, never a requirement.

And Chirp never:

• installs itself, or starts with your computer;
• reads your clipboard unless you paste, or allowed it for a session.

Quitting Chirp cancels your code and link at once. If it can't reach its server as it closes, the server drops them on its own, within about two minutes by default. Until then nobody can get in, because there is no Chirp left to ask you.

Status

Chirp is not yet a runnable product.

Working and tested today:

• The cmd/chirp app — the one program both sides run, in the window above. It shows this machine's code and link, and takes someone else's code or pasted link; the other machine then asks its user in Chirp's own prompt. Once they allow it, the screen and input go through remotekit's stream package, and the owner sees a bar for as long as the session lasts. So far on one machine only: see below. It speaks English and Brazilian Portuguese, following the system's language.
• The relay — cmd/chirp-relay, for a relay you host yourself. It matches the two ends of a session and relays their WebRTC signalling. Written for Chirp — no multi-tenancy, no RBAC — rather than taken from the proprietary Barahn control plane. docs/relay.md runs it behind TLS in a Proxmox LXC container, with Podman, or on any Linux host.
• Fabrintek's relay — https://relay.usechirp.app, which Chirp uses when it is given no relay, with a STUN server on the same name, so two machines can use Chirp without hosting a relay first. It replaces the test relay at relay-test.usechirp.app, which is gone. It is the first node in the public network's registry (network/servers.json), and the status service measures it (to add yours, see docs/joining-the-network.md), but it is not yet the blind public server below: until relays get a public mode (docs/status-page-proposal.md), on the default path it sees the whole code and the signalling, as any relay does. Signal over Nostr if that matters to you.
• The session layer — codes, share links, the consent rules, and per-network limits on guessing codes. Codes, links and the throttle are remotekit's rendezvous package; the state machine, consent rules and values are Chirp's.
• Signalling over Nostr relays — optional session negotiation and signalling over public Nostr relays with -nostr / CHIRP_NOSTR, leaving the server only code lookup and blind to signalling traffic. The code then has ten digits, 482-913-5071: the server sees the first six, and the last four bind the two Chirps through a PAKE, so a relay in the middle cannot pose as either end.

Not here yet:

• A session tried between two machines. The screen and input go through remotekit's stream package, and the tests show one Chirp's screen decoded in another's through the relay, on one machine. Across two machines, and with a Windows owner, is still to do (barahn/chirp#12).
• Downloads. There are no builds to download yet (signed release builds are barahn/chirp#69); build from source below.
• A TURN relay. Until Chirp ships one, self-hosting means bringing your own STUN/TURN (coturn works): see docs/stun-turn.md.
• A public server. When Chirp offers one, it will be blind: it finds the other machine from the first part of the code, and never sees the rest of it or a single signalling message (decision 5). The parts it needs, Nostr signalling and the PAKE, are in.

Planned work is in this repository's issues and the Chirp roadmap project.

Try it from source

cmd/chirp needs cgo, and on Linux the OpenGL, X11 and Wayland headers (libgl1-mesa-dev xorg-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev on Debian and Ubuntu). Start a relay, then two Chirps, and type one's code into the other:

go run ./cmd/chirp-relay
CHIRP_RELAY=http://localhost:8080 go run ./cmd/chirp

Given no relay, Chirp uses Fabrintek's, https://relay.usechirp.app, and its STUN server, stun:relay.usechirp.app:3478, so between two machines it needs nothing set:

go run ./cmd/chirp

The relay only introduces the two Chirps. On different networks they also need STUN, and when both are behind a strict NAT, TURN. Fabrintek's network has no TURN yet: it needs per-session credentials (barahn/remotekit#64). With a relay of your own, Chirp uses no STUN server unless given one with CHIRP_ICE (docs/stun-turn.md).

To signal over Nostr instead, and get the ten-digit code, give both Chirps the same Nostr relays:

CHIRP_RELAY=http://localhost:8080 CHIRP_NOSTR=wss://nostr.example.net go run ./cmd/chirp

Where Chirp sits

Chirp is one of three repositories, and the one you want depends on what you are looking for:

• remotekit (Apache-2.0) is the reusable mechanism: screen capture, VP8 encoding, input injection, clipboard, file transfer, WebRTC. Chirp consumes it as a dependency rather than reimplementing it.
• Chirp (AGPL-3.0-only), this repository, is the on-demand support product.
• Fabrintek's commercial fleet platform is separate and proprietary.

Dependencies point inwards only — Chirp may depend on remotekit, never on the platform. ECOSYSTEM.md states each repository's role, why each licence is the one it is, and how to decide which repository a change belongs in.

Security

Report vulnerabilities privately to [email protected] — not in a public issue. See SECURITY.md.

Chirp grants remote control of an end user's machine, so its pipeline treats that as the threat model rather than an afterthought: every pull request runs gosec, govulncheck, gitleaks, a third-party licence gate, CodeQL and dependency review, with every action pinned to a commit SHA, and all of them are required checks on main. What each gate is for, and the repository settings that back it, are in docs/devsecops.md.

Contributing

Issues and bug reports are welcome, and questions, ideas and design discussion go in Discussions (never post a Chirp code or link there). Everyone taking part follows the Code of Conduct. Pull requests from outside Fabrintek will not be merged yet.

This is deliberate and temporary. Chirp is dual-licensed (see LICENSING.md), which works only while Fabrintek holds the copyright in all of it. Merging a contribution before Contributor License Agreement acceptance is enforced here would leave code in the tree that Fabrintek cannot relicense — quietly, and in a way no build or test would catch. The door stays shut until the CLA is presented and recorded where pull requests actually arrive. CONTRIBUTING.md has the details, and the branch model for those who work on Chirp.

Licence

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 — see LICENSE.

The AGPL is deliberate: Chirp is network-delivered software, and the AGPL is what keeps a hosted fork from taking the code without returning changes.

Fabrintek, as sole copyright holder, also licenses Chirp under separate commercial terms. This does not affect your rights under the AGPL — see LICENSING.md.