Install the ZAgents daemon

Private fork only — this page covers the ZAgents fork (ZurabDev/multica) and is not available upstream. The binary is still named multica; only the distribution channel and instance URLs differ. See PRIVATE_CHANGELOG.md for the change log. The repo-internal hand-off this page mirrors is DEV_DAEMON_ONBOARDING.md.

The daemon is a long-running process on your machine that connects to the ZAgents server and lets the AI coding tools you have installed (the runtimes) pick up and work on tasks. This page installs the fork CLI and points your daemon at our instance, https://zagents.cnt.me.

After the daemon is running, install at least one agent runtime so there is a tool for it to drive.

Prerequisites

• NetBird connected — zagents.cnt.me is reachable only from the NetBird network.

• NetBird k8s-services route selected. Being connected is not enough: the 10.222.0.0/16 subnet (where zagents.cnt.me → 10.222.179.55 lives) is exposed by the k8s-services route, which defaults to Not Selected. Without it DNS resolves but TCP times out. Enable and verify before login/setup:

  netbird routes select k8s-services
  netbird routes list | grep -A1 k8s-services        # Status: Selected
  curl -sS -o /dev/null -w 'http=%{http_code}\n' --max-time 6 https://zagents.cnt.me/health  # expect 200

• Browser Secure DNS / DoH disabled, otherwise zagents.cnt.me will not resolve.

• gh logged in under an account with access to the private ZurabDev/multica (gh auth status). Alternative: a GitHub token with repo:read.

1. Install the fork binary

Substitute your platform in --pattern (darwin-arm64 | darwin-amd64 | linux-amd64 | linux-arm64):

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
gh release download --repo ZurabDev/multica \
  --pattern 'multica-cli-*-darwin-arm64.tar.gz' --dir /tmp/zg --clobber
tar -xzf /tmp/zg/multica-cli-*-darwin-arm64.tar.gz -C ~/.local/bin multica
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/zagents
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ~/.local/bin/zagents 2>/dev/null || true   # macOS
rm -rf /tmp/zg

~/.local/bin must come before /opt/homebrew/bin on your PATH. Verify:

which zagents          # expect ~/.local/bin/zagents
zagents version        # expect 0.3.5-mz.2 (or newer)

2. Point it at the instance

zagents setup self-host \
  --server-url https://zagents.cnt.me \
  --app-url    https://zagents.cnt.me

3. Log in

zagents login

Your browser opens → zagents.cnt.me → email login. The token is saved to ~/.zagents/config.json.

4. Start the daemon

zagents daemon start            # background process
# or install it as a persistent service (macOS launchd):
zagents daemon install

5. Verify

zagents workspace list          # should show our workspaces
zagents daemon status           # running + WS connected

Updating

# repeat step 1 (gh release download → ~/.local/bin/zagents), then:
zagents daemon restart

Troubleshooting

See also

• Daemon and runtimes — how the daemon detects and drives tools
• Install an agent runtime — install the AI coding tools the daemon runs
• CLI command reference — every multica command