resinsight-live

Lets Claude — Claude Code, Cowork, or any MCP client — look at and drive a running ResInsight through its Python/gRPC API, and render pictures of reservoir simulation runs without touching the GUI.

• Follow the user's session. ri_watch reports what changed in the GUI since the last call (time step, cell result, camera, picked cells, cases or views opened). ri_selected_cells and ri_picked_cell_report read the cells the user clicked. ri_snapshot returns an image of a 3D view.

• Query the model. ri_status, ri_overview, ri_view, ri_properties, ri_property_stats, ri_cell_values, ri_time_steps, ri_wells, ri_summary_cases, ri_summary_values.

• Drive the view. ri_open, ri_create_view, ri_set_time_step, ri_set_cell_result, ri_summary_plot, and ri_execute_command for anything else in ResInsight's command API.

• Render pictures of a run. ri_render starts a private ResInsight, writes PNGs (properties at chosen steps, IJK slices, camera presets, summary plots), closes it and returns the images inline. The same renderer is a command-line tool, render.py.

New users: start with GETTING_STARTED.md.

The plugin also ships the resinsight-pictures skill, which tells Claude how to choose slices, steps and cameras, and to read the images before describing them.

Requirements

• ResInsight with its Python interface. Official releases (https://github.com/OPM/ResInsight/releases) should include it, but so far this plugin has only been tested with a source build on macOS; see docs/building-resinsight-macos.md.

• Python ≥ 3.11, macOS or Linux. The launcher bin/run-server creates its own environment in ~/.cache/resinsight-live on first start (about half a minute); later starts are instant.

• Matching rips version. rips must have the same year.month version as ResInsight. The launcher installs the newest one; for an older ResInsight set RIPS_VERSION, e.g. RIPS_VERSION=2026.6.1.1.

Related MCP server: Ansys Workbench MCP

Install

Claude Code

claude plugin marketplace add https://github.com/hnil/resinsight-live
claude plugin install resinsight-live@hnil-reservoir-tools

then restart Claude Code.

Any other MCP client (stdio):

{ "mcpServers": { "resinsight-live": { "command": "/path/to/resinsight-live/bin/run-server" } } }

or one shared HTTP server for several clients: bin/run-server --http --port 8765, then use http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp. The server has no authentication and controls a desktop application, so it refuses any other --host unless you add --allow-remote.

Claude Desktop. Quit the app completely (it rewrites its config file while running), then run python3 install_desktop.py.

Cowork. The server has to run on the machine where ResInsight runs. Cowork may not be able to read files the server writes, which is why ri_render returns its images inline. Not yet tested end to end.

Configuration

Put these in ~/.config/resinsight-live/env, one NAME=value per line. bin/run-server reads that file, so the settings apply to every client — including apps started from the macOS Dock, which never see variables from your shell profile:

RESINSIGHT_EXECUTABLE=/Applications/ResInsight.app/Contents/MacOS/ResInsight
RESINSIGHT_LIVE_ALLOWED_DIRS=$HOME/simulations:$HOME/projects

Upgrading from 0.1 (resinsight-mcp): the old ~/.config/resinsight-mcp/env and RESINSIGHT_MCP_* names are still read, with a warning, until the next release.

Limiting which files the server touches

Claude Code's sandbox confines only its Bash tool. MCP servers, and the ResInsight that ri_render starts, run outside it, and permission rules such as Read(...) do not apply to MCP tools either. With RESINSIGHT_LIVE_ALLOWED_DIRS set, the server enforces the limit itself:

• every path given to ri_open, ri_render (case, out, template) and every file or folder argument of ri_execute_command must be absolute and resolve, after following symlinks, inside one of the directories;

• exports that write to ResInsight's global export folder are refused until setExportFolder has been called with an allowed directory, and saveProject needs an explicit filePath;

• commands with file arguments this server does not know about are refused.

runOctaveScript is always disabled, since it runs arbitrary code.

What the limit does not cover: files ResInsight opens by itself — the UNRST/SMSPEC next to a case (same directory), and the case files a project (.rsp) refers to — and anything done in the ResInsight GUI. ri_render and ri_snapshot write their own images to the system temp directory when no output folder is given.

Starting ResInsight on macOS

Start the binary, not the app bundle:

/Applications/ResInsight.app/Contents/MacOS/ResInsight &

An app launched with open or from Finder gets no permission for ~/Documents unless you grant it in System Settings → Privacy & Security, and then cannot load cases stored there.

render.py

~/.cache/resinsight-live/venv/bin/python render.py RUN_DIR --list
~/.cache/resinsight-live/venv/bin/python render.py RUN_DIR -o OUT \
    -p TEMP,STRESSXX -s first,last --slice j=6 -z 5 -v WBHP:B-3H

Behaviour worth knowing

• The server keeps no state of its own except ri_watch's baseline, so each client sees changes since its own last call.

• Default ids of -1 mean "the first case/view"; id 0 is a real id.

• The server never closes or resizes the ResInsight it drives (closeProject is refused). ri_render's private instance listens on a port outside 50051–50070, so other clients' scans never attach to it.

Implementation notes

Things that were not obvious when building this:

• Cell filters cannot be created over gRPC: the DataFilterCollection API makes filters that no view uses. render.py writes the slice into a saved project file (<CellFilters><CellRangeFilter>…) and reopens it.

• CameraMatrix is the world-to-eye view matrix, row-major, with the model centred at the origin.

• PdmObject.update() writes back every field, including a stale current_time_step: set camera and z-scale before set_time_step, never after.

• Summary plots land on a 2×2 page by default; set the MultiSummaryPlot to 1×1 before exporting, and export the page rather than the SummaryPlot.

• rips sends its working directory to ResInsight on connect, and the connection fails if ResInsight may not read that folder; the launcher therefore starts the server from $HOME.

Related projects

resinsight-mcp by Lukas Mosser is an independent ResInsight MCP server. Both can be installed together: names, environments and caches differ, and each should drive its own ResInsight instance.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE.