claude-hop 0.4.0

Sync Claude Code sessions between two machines over SSH — no cloud.

Start a Claude Code session on your Linux desktop, claude --resume it on your Mac — or any pair of your machines. claude-hop syncs ~/.claude/projects/ over SSH with rsync, rewriting the absolute paths that would otherwise make sessions invisible on the other side. No cloud, no accounts: your machines, your keys, your sessions.

Quickstart (30 seconds)

uv tool install claude-hop        # or: pipx install claude-hop
claude-hop init                   # asks for the SSH host, detects the rest
claude-hop push                   # then `claude --resume` on the other machine

No uv? One-liner that installs it first:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SeiduTakizawa/Claude-hop/main/install.sh | bash

Requirements: Python ≥ 3.11 on this machine; sshd and rsync on the other one (key-based SSH auth recommended).

See it in action

Real commands against a sandbox — scripted with VHS, so it re-renders instead of re-recording.

The problem it solves

Claude Code stores sessions in ~/.claude/projects/, indexed by the absolute path of the project with every non-alphanumeric character replaced by a dash:

/home/alice/work/webshop   →   ~/.claude/projects/-home-alice-work-webshop/

The absolute paths also appear inside the session JSONL files — cwd fields, file paths in tool calls. Copy the files verbatim from a Linux box (/home/alice) to a Mac (/Users/alice) and claude --resume can never find them: the directory name encodes the wrong path and the transcript still references the wrong filesystem.

claude-hop rewrites both during sync — directory names and JSONL contents — mapping your home here to your home there (auto-detected at init), in whichever direction you sync. The rewrite is boundary-aware (/home/al never matches inside /home/alice) and round-trip safe: push then pull reproduces your files byte for byte.

Commands

Command	What it does
claude-hop init	Interactive setup: SSH host, connection test, remote home auto-detection, rsync checks. With an existing config it offers to add another remote.
claude-hop status [REMOTE]	Table of local projects, session counts, and the remapped name each gets on the remote; flags ambiguous mappings.
claude-hop diff [REMOTE]	What would sync, in both directions, without writing anything.
claude-hop push [REMOTE]	Send local sessions to a remote machine. --all pushes to every remote.
claude-hop pull [REMOTE]	Fetch a remote's sessions and merge them in. --all pulls from every remote.
claude-hop doctor [REMOTE]	Environment checks: SSH, rsync versions, config, running Claude Code, stale staging dirs. Checks every remote by default.
claude-hop remotes	List configured remotes (--check probes them over SSH).
claude-hop remotes add/remove/rename	Manage remotes; add runs the same wizard as init.
claude-hop remotes migrate	Upgrade an old single-remote config to the multi-remote format (backs up the original first).
claude-hop upgrade	Upgrade claude-hop itself to the latest release (works for uv, pipx, and pip installs).

push and pull accept --dry-run (-n), --yes (-y), --force, and --all.

Which remote runs? An explicit name wins (claude-hop push mac); with exactly one remote configured the name can be omitted; with several and no name, commands refuse and list your options — nothing is picked implicitly. The first positional argument counts as a remote only when it exactly matches a configured remote name; anything else is a project selector, and a near-miss of a remote name is an error with a suggestion rather than a silent no-op. If a directory in your cwd shares a remote's name, write ./name to mean the project.

Multiple machines are hub-and-spoke. This machine is the operator; remotes only need sshd and rsync, and remotes never talk to each other. To move sessions between two remotes, route through the hub — claude-hop pull mac then claude-hop push thinkpad — the merge semantics (newer file wins, never deletes) make that safe in any order.

Syncing a single project

push, pull, and diff take optional project selectors — by default they sync everything:

claude-hop push .                             # just the project you're standing in
claude-hop pull ~/work/webshop                # one project, by path
claude-hop push -- -home-alice-work-webshop   # by encoded name, as shown in `status`
claude-hop diff . ~/work/blog                 # several at once

Encoded names start with a dash, so pass them after the standard -- separator — everything after -- is a selector, never an option.

Selectors are asymmetric on purpose: push matches them against your local projects, while pull translates them through the mapping and matches against the remote's projects — so pulling a project that doesn't exist locally yet works.

When a selection is given, only those projects sync and the optional [sync] extras (history/agents/skills) are skipped.

Safety model

• Merge, never clobber. rsync runs with -u (newer file wins) and never with --delete — a sync can only add or update sessions, never remove.
• Staging, not in-place. Remapping happens in a temp dir; ~/.claude/projects/ is only ever touched by the merge itself.
• Refuses to run alongside Claude Code. Sessions are flushed to disk on exit, so syncing mid-session would miss your latest work. Override with --force if you know what you're doing.
• First-pull backup. The first pull that would merge into existing local sessions offers a tarball backup (~/.claude/backups/) before touching anything.

Configuration

~/.config/claude-hop/config.toml (written by init, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME honoured). Each machine you sync with is a named [remotes.<name>] table:

[remotes.mac]
host = "mac.local"          # SSH alias or hostname; "" = a local directory
home = "/Users/alice"       # auto-detected at init

[remotes.thinkpad]
host = "192.168.1.50"
home = "/home/al"

# per-remote mappings: merged over the global [mappings], per-remote wins
[remotes.mac.mappings]
"/home/alice/work/webshop" = "/Users/alice/projects/webshop"

[sync]                      # applies to all remotes
include_history = false     # also sync ~/.claude/history.jsonl (remapped)
include_agents = false      # also sync ~/.claude/agents/ (verbatim)
include_skills = false      # also sync ~/.claude/skills/ (verbatim)

[mappings]
# Global: projects at *different relative paths* on the other machines.
# Specific mappings win over the generic home remap.
"/home/alice/work/blog" = "/srv/blog"

Configs from claude-hop ≤ 0.2.0 (a single [remote] table) keep working and are read as a remote named default; run claude-hop remotes migrate to upgrade the file in place (the original is backed up first).

claude-hop status shows exactly how every project will map; if one looks wrong, add it under [mappings] (or the remote's own mappings table).

WSL / projects outside $HOME

The generic home remap only helps paths that contain your home. Projects elsewhere — the classic case is WSL work under /mnt/c/... — need a mapping prefix, or their sessions would land on the remote with paths claude --resume can't find:

[remotes.mac.mappings]
"/mnt/c/Users/tasos" = "/Users/tasos/win"

You don't have to work this out yourself: status flags affected projects, push/pull refuse them with a ready-to-paste snippet (computed from the projects' real paths), and init/remotes add offer to add the prefix mapping during setup. --force pushes them unchanged if you really want that.

Supported platforms

Any pair of Unix-shaped machines, in either direction: Linux ↔ macOS, Linux ↔ Linux, macOS ↔ macOS. The remap isn't tied to /home vs /Users — it maps your home here to your home there, whatever they are (identical homes on both sides work too; the remap just becomes a no-op and you keep the merge/safety machinery).

Windows is supported via WSL: inside WSL you have a real Linux home, rsync, and sshd, so claude-hop works there like on any Linux box — it syncs the Claude Code you run inside WSL. Native (non-WSL) Windows is not supported: Claude Code encodes C:\ project paths differently and there's no native rsync. If you need it, open an issue.

Limitations worth knowing

• Sessions whose conversation text literally mentions the other machine's home path (e.g. a transcript discussing /Users/alice/... while on the Linux box) can't be rewritten losslessly — path rewriting is text-level by design, so such mentions get remapped too.
• Session files that aren't valid UTF-8 are copied verbatim without remapping rather than risk corrupting them.
• On macOS 15+, the bundled rsync is openrsync; it works, but if you hit option errors, brew install rsync.

Troubleshooting

• An update didn't come back after working on the other machine. Merging is newer-file-wins, so clocks are load-bearing: claude-hop doctor warns when a remote's clock is skewed by more than 30 seconds. Run push/pull with --verbose to see any files a merge skipped because the destination copy was newer.
• The resumed conversation shows up as a second session. claude --resume continues a synced conversation into a new session file, so after syncing back you'll see both the original and the continuation in the picker. That's Claude Code's session model, not a sync bug — both files sync fine.
• "host reachable, but key-based auth isn't set up". Probes never use passwords (they'd hang invisibly), so password-only hosts show this message. Run the suggested ssh-copy-id user@host once, or point the config's host at an ~/.ssh/config alias that carries your key.

Development

uv sync           # install with dev dependencies
uv run pytest     # unit + integration tests (integration needs rsync)
uv run ruff check .
make e2e          # full two-container SSH round trip (needs Docker)

The e2e rig (e2e/) spins up two containers — one with a Linux-style home, one macOS-style — wires SSH key auth between them, and drives the real CLI through push, modify-on-the-other-side, and pull.

Regenerating the demo

The README GIF is scripted, not hand-recorded: demo/setup.sh builds a self-contained sandbox (fake home, two local-path remotes) and demo/demo.tape replays real commands against it with VHS. When CLI output changes, run make demo (needs vhs, ttyd, ffmpeg) and commit the refreshed assets/claude-hop.gif.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.