claude-account

Manually switch between multiple Claude Code accounts (e.g. a personal and a work subscription) from the terminal — without signing out and back in.

It swaps only the subscription token and account identity, leaving your MCP server auth and all project state untouched:

• claudeAiOauth in ~/.claude/.credentials.json — the subscription token
• oauthAccount in ~/.claude.json — the account identity

Everything else — mcpOAuth, project history, settings — is preserved. Each switch backs up your host files first.

Disclaimer. This is an unofficial, community tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic. "Claude" and "Anthropic" are trademarks of Anthropic, PBC. It only shuffles credential files that already live on your own machine; it talks to no Anthropic service itself. Use it to switch between accounts you personally own, manually. Don't use it to automate around usage limits.

Install

# run without installing
uvx claude-account status

# or install as a persistent tool
uv tool install claude-account
# or
pipx install claude-account

Requires the claude CLI on your PATH (only for capture) and Python 3.9+.

Quick start

Two accounts, called primary and backup:

claude-account snapshot primary   # store the account you're already on
claude-account capture  backup    # opens an isolated login for the 2nd account
claude-account swap               # flip between them

Handy shell aliases:

alias cas='claude-account swap'
alias cass='claude-account status'

Commands

Slots live in ~/.claude-accounts/; host backups in ~/.claude-accounts/backups/. Paths can be overridden with CLAUDE_CRED_FILE, CLAUDE_CONFIG_FILE, and CLAUDE_ACCOUNTS_DIR.

How it works

capture logs in inside a throwaway CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, so your host login is never touched, then copies out just that account's claudeAiOauth + oauthAccount. swap/use do the reverse surgically: they write the target slot's claudeAiOauth into .credentials.json and its oauthAccount into .claude.json, preserving every other key. Before switching away, the current account's live tokens are saved back into its slot (Claude Code rotates refresh tokens, so stale copies would eventually stop working).

Do a switch between claude sessions — a running session holds its token in memory. Slot files contain refresh tokens; treat them as secrets (they are written 0600 and ~/.claude-accounts/ is 0700).

Development

uv run --group dev pytest -q
uv build

Releasing

Tag a version and push; CI builds and publishes to PyPI via Trusted Publishing (OIDC, no tokens):

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

License

MIT — see LICENSE.