claude-portage 0.2.1

Portable Claude Code workspace archives

claude-portage

Portable Claude Code workspace archives.

Claude Code stores per-project session history, file snapshots, and metadata in ~/.claude/ using a path-encoding scheme (e.g., /Users/alice/src/foo → -Users-alice-src-foo). This data is tightly coupled to absolute paths, making it impossible to move a project to another machine or directory and use claude --continue or claude --resume.

claude-portage bundles a project + its Claude metadata into a portable archive that can be unpacked anywhere with automatic path rewriting. It also supports in-place renaming when you move a project directory locally.

Installation

# Homebrew
brew tap ebowman/claude-portage
brew install claude-portage

# pip
pip install claude-portage

# Or run directly (zero dependencies)
python3 claude_portage.py <command>

Usage

Pack a project

claude-portage pack /path/to/my-project
# Creates my-project.portage.tar.gz

claude-portage pack /path/to/my-project -o /tmp/backup.portage.tar.gz
claude-portage pack /path/to/my-project --no-project-files  # metadata only
claude-portage pack /path/to/my-project --include-debug -v   # include debug logs

Inspect an archive

claude-portage inspect my-project.portage.tar.gz
claude-portage inspect my-project.portage.tar.gz -v  # show individual files

Unpack to a new location

claude-portage unpack my-project.portage.tar.gz /new/path/to/my-project
# Project files extracted to /new/path/to/my-project
# Claude metadata placed in ~/.claude/ with all paths rewritten

Then:

cd /new/path/to/my-project
claude --resume  # Sessions from the original machine appear

Rename a project directory

After moving/renaming a project directory, update Claude's metadata to match:

mv ~/src/foo ~/src/bar
claude-portage rename ~/src/foo ~/src/bar

This rewrites all paths in the session JSONL, subagent logs, todos, etc. and renames the metadata directory in ~/.claude/projects/. Sessions will work seamlessly with claude --resume from the new location.

How It Works

1. Pack discovers all Claude metadata for a project: session JSONL files, subagent logs, tool results, file-history snapshots, session environments, todos, plans, and memory.
2. The archive includes a manifest.json recording the source absolute paths.
3. Unpack extracts project files and places Claude metadata into ~/.claude/ on the target machine, performing line-by-line string replacement of all source paths with target paths.
4. Path rewriting handles the project path, the Claude config directory path, and the encoded directory name, applied longest-first to avoid partial matches.

Known Limitations

• Path rewriting is string-based, not JSON-aware. This works because paths appear in many contexts (command strings, tool outputs, file paths) where structured rewriting would miss them.
• File-history snapshots (source code versions) are copied as-is without path rewriting, since they are project source code, not metadata.
• The archive does not include Claude's global config (settings.json, API keys, etc.) — only project-specific session data.
• Session UUIDs are preserved; if the same session ID already exists at the target, files will be overwritten.

License

MIT