Your First Session

This guide walks you through creating a session, detaching from it, reattaching, and cleaning up. It should take about two minutes.

Start a session

Run carryon with a name for your session:

carryon --name dev

Three things happen behind the scenes:

1. The carryOn daemon starts automatically (if it is not already running).
2. A new terminal session called dev is created.
3. Your terminal attaches to that session.

You are now inside a persistent shell. Anything you run here - long builds, dev servers, log tails - keeps running even after you detach.

You can also run carryon without a name to get a session with an auto-generated name:

carryon

Choosing a backend

By default, carryOn uses its native backend. If you have tmux installed and prefer it, pass the --backend flag:

carryon --name dev --backend tmux

See Basic Commands for more on backends and how to change the default.

Detach from the session

To leave the session without stopping it, press:

Ctrl+C  Ctrl+C

That is a double tap - press Ctrl+C twice in quick succession. You will drop back to your original terminal, and the session continues running in the background.

Tip

A single Ctrl+C is sent through to the program running inside the session as usual. The double-tap pattern is how carryOn distinguishes “interrupt the program” from “detach from the session.”

Reattach to the session

From any terminal - even on a different machine with the right setup - reconnect with:

carryon attach dev

You will pick up right where you left off, with your full scrollback intact. Scrollback is the history of everything that has been printed to the terminal - command output, logs, prompts, and so on. carryOn captures and preserves this buffer so that when you reattach, you see the same output as if you had never left.

Sessions are resilient. They survive editor crashes, SSH disconnections, terminal emulator closes, and even daemon restarts. As long as the session has not been explicitly killed, it is still running and you can reattach to it.

Enable the web UI

carryOn includes a built-in web interface for viewing and interacting with your sessions from a browser:

carryon config set local.enabled true

Once enabled, open http://localhost:8384 in your browser to see all running sessions. You can view output, send input, and manage sessions without leaving the browser.

Kill the session

When you are finished with a session, remove it:

carryon kill dev

This terminates the shell and any processes still running inside it.

Stop the daemon

The carryOn daemon stays running in the background so it can manage sessions across terminal windows and reconnections. If you want to stop it entirely:

carryon stop

Your sessions survive daemon restarts - when you start the daemon again, your sessions will still be there.

Next steps

Now that you know the basics, check out the Basic Commands reference for the full set of CLI commands.