claude-snapshot

**Portable Claude Code setup snapshots.** Export your config, plugins, hooks, and global instructions — apply on another machine in under 2 minutes.
Why
- **Multiple machines** — Keep your personal and work setups in sync. Export at home, drop the file on Drive, apply at work.
- **Mac format / OS reinstall** — Save a snapshot before wiping your machine. Restore your entire Claude Code setup after a fresh install.
- **Safe rollback** — About to experiment with new plugins or risky config changes? Take a snapshot first. If things break, apply the snapshot and you're back to a known good state.
- **Onboarding** — New team member? Share your team's snapshot and they're up and running with the same plugins, hooks, and conventions.
Principles
Design decisions in this plugin are evaluated against these principles.
**[P1] Minimal Blast Radius**: one-shot commands, no daemon, no background watch, no network. Every side effect is triggered by an explicit user command and scoped to ~/.claude/ plus the output tarball path.
**[P2] Allowlist Over Denylist**: snapshots contain an explicit list of artifacts (settings, CLAUDE.md, hooks, plugin manifests, MCP servers). New files Claude Code adds in future versions are NOT auto-captured — plugin updates decide what gets included. This is the opposite trade-off from wholesale-capture tools; we pay with manual maintenance and gain predictable, auditable snapshot contents.
**[P3] No Network, Ever**: export and apply are local-only. Plugin reinstallation during apply delegates to Claude Code's own /plugin install mechanism, which manages network access itself. claude-snapshot makes zero outbound requests.
**[P4] Diff Before Destroy**: every apply is preceded by a diff summary the user must acknowledge. Every overwritten file is first copied to .bak. Snapshot contents are always inspectable without extraction via /snapshot:inspect.
**[P5] Cross-Platform First-Class**: the plugin is Node.js, not bash. It runs the same on macOS and Linux without polyfills, different code paths, or GNU-coreutils assumptions. Windows via WSL is supported; native Windows is best-effort.
Prerequisites
- Claude Code with plugin support
- Node.js 18+ (the plugin uses the tar npm package for archive I/O)
Install
As a Claude Code plugin (recommended)
Try without installing (via npx)
No marketplace registration, no install, no reload — run it straight from the npm registry:
Writes a snapshot to ~/claude-snapshot-YYYY-MM-DD.tar.gz and prints the path. The other commands take that path as their only argument:
Useful for one-off backups, CI, or trying the tool before adding the plugin to your Claude Code setup.
The CLI prints a human-readable summary on an interactive terminal and a single JSON line when piped — pass --json to force JSON in a terminal.
Commands
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| /snapshot:export | Export your setup as a portable .tar.gz snapshot |
| /snapshot:inspect | Preview snapshot contents without extracting |
| /snapshot:diff | Compare a snapshot against your current setup |
| /snapshot:apply | Apply a snapshot to this machine (with confirmation) |
Typical workflows
Sync between machines
Backup before format
Safe experimentation
What migrates
| Artifact | Included |
|---|---|