Claude Warmup for OpenWrt

Keeps your Claude Pro/Max subscription's rolling 5-hour usage window warm by sending a tiny Haiku ping from your OpenWrt router — no PC, Raspberry Pi, or cloud service required.

Not affiliated with Anthropic. Community tool, MIT licensed.

Features

• Real window tracking — reads Anthropic's own rate-limit response headers, not a local guess, so it stays accurate even if the window was actually started by other usage (Claude Code, claude.ai, mobile app) before this tool ever pinged.
• Two scheduling modes — keep the window continuously warm around the clock, or stay quiet until a fixed time you pick (00:00–23:59) and then keep it continuously warm for the rest of that day, going quiet again overnight before the next day's start time.
• 5h + 7-day usage bars — utilization and reset time for both subscription limits, at a glance.
• Token validity tracking — enter your token's issue date once, get a running countdown to its 1-year expiry.
• Error detection — the status box turns red immediately on an invalid/expired/revoked token; other failures (e.g. a network blip) only alarm after 3 in a row, so a single transient hiccup doesn't false-alarm. A built-in log viewer (📄) shows the last 100 lines, in plain language ("settings saved via web UI - ...", "ping sent (manual)...") rather than opaque internal messages.
• Optional password protection — off by default; set your own passphrase for the page any time from a collapsible panel behind a lock icon, no reinstall needed.
• German/English UI — auto-detected from the browser, switchable, remembered.
• LuCI integration — reachable from Services → Claude Warmup, not just a standalone URL.
• Tiny footprint — a handful of shell scripts + one static HTML page. No Node.js, no database, no build step — under 1MB installed including the curl dependency.

The problem

Claude's usage limit is a rolling 5-hour window that starts on your first message of the day, not at midnight. Start working at noon, and your window resets at noon — even if you're mid-task at 4:55pm.

How it works

1. Runs entirely on the router (tested on a Xiaomi AX3600, aarch64, OpenWrt 25.12 — should work on any OpenWrt device with enough flash/RAM for a ~5KB shell script).

2. Uses the official claude setup-token command to generate a long-lived OAuth token scoped to user:inference only — the same mechanism Anthropic documents for CI/headless use (e.g. GitHub Actions). This is not a scraped session token or a spoofed client.

3. A cron job on the router periodically (or at a fixed time) sends a minimal POST to api.anthropic.com/v1/messages using that token, authenticating against your subscription's usage window.

4. The response carries real rate-limit headers (anthropic-ratelimit-unified-5h-reset, -utilization) with the actual server-side window reset time — this is what's tracked and displayed, not a local guess. That matters because the window can already be running from other usage (Claude Code, claude.ai, mobile app) before this tool ever pings; a purely local "last ping + 5h" estimate would be wrong in that case. Reading the header keeps it accurate. This requires curl (installed automatically) since the router's built-in wget can't read response headers.

5. Two modes:

   • Keep warm (default): checks every 5 minutes, refires the instant the previous window has expired — your window is effectively always fresh.
   • Fixed time: stays quiet until the time you choose (00:00–23:59), fires the first ping there, then behaves exactly like keep-warm for the rest of that day — going quiet again overnight once the last window before midnight naturally expires, until the next day's start time. Good if you don't want pings firing while you're asleep. The time you enter is always in your browser's timezone, converted automatically to the router's own timezone under the hood — so it works correctly even if your router's clock is set to UTC (the OpenWrt default) while you're not.

6. A small web UI on the router lets you switch modes and pick the time, and shows how much of the current window is left. It also shows your 5h and 7-day usage (percent utilized + reset time), since Pro/Max subscriptions are capped by both. It's linked from LuCI under Services → Claude Warmup.

   These usage numbers are only as fresh as the last ping — they don't update in real time. The cron check (every 5 min) and the web UI's own polling (every 15s) never call Anthropic themselves; only an actual warm-up ping does, which happens roughly once per 5h window (or once at the fixed-mode start time, then every ~5h after). If you use Claude actively between pings, that usage won't show up here until the next one fires. "Ping now" fetches current numbers on demand, but it's a real API request — Haiku, capped at 16 output tokens, so tiny — and it does consume a small amount of your actual quota. It's not a free refresh; use it when you actually want to check or force a warm-up, not as a casual "just curious" button.

7. If pings start failing, the status box gets a red border. A token that's invalid/expired/revoked (HTTP 401/403) flags this immediately, since that never fixes itself. Other failures (e.g. a network blip) only flag after 3 in a row, so a single transient hiccup during keep-warm's 5-minute checks doesn't cause false alarms. A 📄 button in the header shows the last 100 log lines for troubleshooting.

Requirements

• OpenWrt router with uci and cron (/etc/init.d/cron) — present on any stock OpenWrt. The installer pulls in curl (~500KB) automatically via apk (OpenWrt 25.12+) or opkg (older releases). Tested on OpenWrt 25.12.2 (aarch64); the underlying shell script has no version-specific dependencies, so considerably older releases should work too, just less thoroughly verified.
• A Claude Pro or Max subscription.
• Claude Code installed on any PC, just once, to generate the token.

Install

SSH into your router, then:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BrightRaider/claude-code-warmup-openwrt/main/install.sh | sh

You'll be prompted for the token the first time (see below). The installer places files under /etc/claudewarmup, /usr/bin, and /www, and sets up the cron job.

Generating the token

On a PC with Claude Code installed and logged into your subscription:

claude setup-token

This opens a browser login and prints a token like sk-ant-oat01-..., valid for 1 year. Copy it — it's shown only once. Paste it when install.sh asks for it.

Treat this token like a password. Anyone with it can send messages using your subscription's quota. The installer stores it at /etc/claudewarmup/token with chmod 600 (root-only).

Using it

Open http://<router-ip>/claudewarmup/ (or LuCI → Services → Claude Warmup). From there you can:

• Toggle the whole thing on/off
• Switch between Keep warm and Fixed time mode, and pick the time
• See your 5h, 7-day, and token-validity usage bars
• Fire a manual test ping
• View the last 100 log lines (📄 icon)
• Set or remove a page password (🔒/🔓 icon)
• Switch between German and English (DE/EN)

Security note

The web page at /claudewarmup/ is open by default — no password. Worst case if an untrusted device on your network (guest Wi-Fi, IoT, VPN clients) finds it: it can flip the mode, change the schedule, or fire a manual ping. It cannot read your OAuth token or use your subscription beyond that fixed tiny message — there's no account/security compromise, just possible annoyance.

If that's not acceptable on your network, open the page's Access protection section and set your own password there, any time — no reinstall needed. It's a shared page-level secret (stored at /etc/claudewarmup/webauth), not a full user/session system. Forgot it? Delete the file over SSH (rm /etc/claudewarmup/webauth) to reopen the page.

Uninstall

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BrightRaider/claude-code-warmup-openwrt/main/uninstall.sh | sh

Why this is safe (and what would not be)

This project only ever calls the API through a token minted by Anthropic's own claude setup-token command, using the same request shape Claude Code itself uses. It does not extract session credentials from ~/.claude/.credentials.json, does not spoof a browser session, and does not automate the claude.ai website. If you're adapting this for something else, keep it that way — anything that impersonates a client using scraped credentials risks your account.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

Credits

The core idea — using claude setup-token to send a scheduled warm-up ping — comes from tappress/claude-code-warmup, a Node/Vercel-based implementation. This project reworks that idea to run entirely on an OpenWrt router instead, with a different feature set (resource usage bars, token validity tracking, LuCI integration, web UI, and more).

License

MIT