Claude Replay

The observability layer for Claude Code sessions — search, analytics, and visualization across every project.

Claude Code's --resume/--continue and /rewind recover the session you're in. Claude Replay does the part they don't: it hooks passively into every session, records what happened to a local SQLite store, and makes every past session — across every project — searchable, comparable, measurable, and exportable. Full-text search, per-session insight metrics, death-cause classification (why a session ended), session diffing, a web dashboard, and a terminal UI — none of which Claude Code has natively.

Claude Code session
        |
   hooks (PreToolUse · PostToolUse · Stop)
        |
        v
   ~/.claude-replay/sessions.db   ← events + checkpoints
        |
   +----+--------------------+
   |          |              |
 MCP tools  Dashboard      TUI
 (resume)   :8766          (browse)

Passive hooks write. MCP tools, the web dashboard, and the terminal UI read. Nothing leaves your machine.

How this complements native Claude Code

Claude Replay is additive — it layers on top of the built-ins, it doesn't replace them.

Think of native resume/rewind as recovery, and Replay as observability over your whole history.

Related MCP server: claude-code-mcp

Architecture

Passive hooks write to SQLite. MCP tools read from SQLite. Dashboard + TUI visualize SQLite. That's the whole system.

Port 8766 deliberately one above Claude Bridge's 8765, so the two siblings can run side by side without colliding.

Quickstart

1. Install

pip install claude-replay

Or from a clone if you'd like to hack on it:

git clone https://github.com/constripacity/Claude-Replay.git
cd Claude-Replay
pip install -e .[dev]              # editable install with test/lint deps
pip install -e .[tui]             # add the terminal UI deps (textual, httpx)

If pip install -e fails on your environment (a known hatchling editable-install quirk on some setups), install the deps directly instead: pip install mcp starlette uvicorn anyio textual httpx.

2. Install the hooks

This wires Replay into Claude Code by merging three hooks into ~/.claude/settings.json. It's idempotent and leaves any other tools' hooks untouched.

claude-replay install

✓ Installed Claude Replay hooks into ~/.claude/settings.json
  PreToolUse  → claude-replay hook pre-tool
  PostToolUse → claude-replay hook post-tool
  Stop        → claude-replay hook stop

From now on, every Claude Code session is recorded automatically. Remove the hooks any time with claude-replay uninstall (it removes only Replay's hooks).

Confirm it's actually wired up — the one check that matters:

claude-replay doctor

Claude Replay — doctor

  ✓ Hooks installed: PreToolUse / PostToolUse / Stop are in settings.json
  ✓ Hook command on PATH: claude-replay → …/claude-replay
  ✓ Database: ~/.claude-replay/sessions.db
  ✓ Sessions recorded: 3 sessions; most recent 5m ago

All good — Replay is installed and recording. ✓

If doctor warns that claude-replay isn't on PATH, the hooks can't run and nothing is recorded — put your install directory on PATH and re-run it.

3. Start the server (dashboard + MCP tools)

claude-replay serve                 # defaults: 127.0.0.1:8766
claude-replay serve --port 9000     # custom port
claude-replay serve --host 0.0.0.0  # bind all interfaces

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  Claude Replay — Session checkpoint & recovery server
  Version: 0.3.0
  DB: ~/.claude-replay/sessions.db
  http://localhost:8766/             ← Dashboard
  http://localhost:8766/sse          ← MCP config
  http://localhost:8766/api/state    ← JSON state
  http://localhost:8766/status       ← Health check
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

4. (Optional) Register the MCP tools with Claude Code

So a running Claude Code session can call replay_resume, replay_checkpoint, etc. directly. Two ways:

SSE (alongside the dashboard — needs claude-replay serve running):

claude mcp add --transport sse -s user claude-replay http://localhost:8766/sse

stdio (no server process — the client launches Replay on demand):

claude mcp add -s user claude-replay -- claude-replay mcp
# or, without installing: uvx claude-replay mcp

Verify with claude mcp list claude-replay should show ✓ Connected. Inside an already-running session, type /mcp to re-handshake.

When a session dies

# What's the state of the last session?
claude-replay status

# Print a paste-ready resume brief (most recent session, or pass an id)
claude-replay resume
claude-replay resume <session-id>

# Browse every recorded session in the terminal
claude-replay tui                   # needs `claude-replay serve` running

# Export a session as a self-contained HTML trace
claude-replay export                # → ~/.claude-replay/exports/<id>.html

Paste the resume output into a fresh Claude Code session and it picks up where the dead one left off objective, what was done, what's next, and which files were touched.

MCP Tools

Every connected Claude Code session gets these ten tools:

CLI Reference

Dashboard & TUI

Web dashboard (claude-replay serve, then open http://localhost:8766/) a vanilla-JS view that polls every 2 s: session list (with how-it-ended badge + tags), a live search box, per-session timeline, and one-click "Copy Resume Brief" / "Export HTML". No CDN, no build step.

Terminal UI (claude-replay tui) a Textual browser in the same dark theme. A session sidebar, a live event feed, and a detail inspector showing how the session ended, its tags, the latest checkpoint, and files touched. Keys:

↑↓ navigate   Tab switch panel   Space pause
r  resume (copies the brief to your clipboard)
e  export HTML trace
?  help        q quit

The TUI talks to the server over HTTP start claude-replay serve first (defaults to http://127.0.0.1:8766; point elsewhere with --url).

Configuration

The hook path is offline-first by design: it makes no network calls and completes in well under 50 ms just the one SQLite write. Large tool payloads are truncated at 8 KB per event so the DB stays lean.

Development

pip install -e .[dev]               # or install deps directly (see install note)
python -m pytest                    # full suite
ruff check .

Tests use an isolated tmp_path SQLite database (the fresh_db fixture) — they never touch your real ~/.claude-replay/sessions.db. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the scope and the coding rules.

License

MIT see LICENSE.

Sibling to Claude Bridge. Built under the Constripacity banner.