Claude Code Chats

A web app for browsing and searching your local Claude Code chat history.

Features

• Project Browser — View all your Claude Code projects with search, filter, and sorting (recent, name, messages, sessions)
• Session History — Browse chat sessions for each project with timestamps and message counts
• Message Viewer — Expand full conversation threads including tool use and results
• Full-Text Search — Search across all messages with optional project-scoped filtering, powered by SQLite FTS5
• Session Management — Resume, duplicate, or delete sessions
• AI Summaries — Generate summaries for sessions and projects via the Claude CLI
• Project Memory — View project memory files when available
• Database Sync — One-click sync to index your chat history into a local SQLite database

Quick Start

npx cc-chats

This downloads, builds, and starts the app on http://localhost:3000.

To use a different port:

npx cc-chats --port 4000

Multiple Claude profiles

By default cc-chats reads ~/.claude, honouring CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR if Claude Code is configured to live elsewhere. If you keep separate profiles, point each instance at its own config directory:

cc-chats --config-dir ~/.claude-work     --port 3001
cc-chats --config-dir ~/.claude-personal --port 3002

Each profile keeps its own sessions, archive, search index and settings, so the two never mix.

Every instance shows which profile it is serving: a name badge in the header, a colour accent derived from the config directory (so two windows are distinguishable at a glance), and the profile name in the browser tab title. The name is derived from the directory — ~/.claude-ee becomes ee — or set it explicitly:

cc-chats --config-dir ~/.claude-ee --profile-name "Equal Experts" --port 3001

Reclaiming space from image-heavy sessions

Sessions that pass screenshots or pictures to Claude store them as base64 inside the JSONL, which can dominate the size of a project. strip-images replaces those payloads with a placeholder noting the media type and original size, leaving every message, timestamp and tool call intact:

cc-chats strip-images                              # dry run over ~/.claude
cc-chats strip-images --config-dir ~/.claude-work  # dry run over another profile
cc-chats strip-images --project comics-manager     # limit to matching project dirs
cc-chats strip-images --write                      # apply

The app surfaces the same thing: sessions carrying more than 2 MB of images get a badge, and any project holding images offers a Strip images action (styled as a warning once it passes 50 MB), behind a confirmation that spells out the irreversibility.

The CLI streams each file, rewrites atomically, preserves file mtimes (which retention and archive mirroring depend on), and is idempotent. It is not reversible — the images are gone once written.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• Claude Code installed locally (reads from ~/.claude/projects, or $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/projects)

Install Globally

npm install -g cc-chats
cc-chats

Development

git clone https://github.com/psousa50/claude-code-chats.git
cd claude-code-chats
npm install
npm run dev

How It Works

The app reads Claude Code's local JSONL files at ~/.claude/projects to display your chat history. Clicking Sync indexes all conversations into a SQLite database at ~/.claude/chat-search.db for fast full-text search.

AI Summaries

Summaries are generated by invoking claude -p under the hood. This requires Claude Code to be installed and authenticated on your machine.

If running the app as a background service (e.g. via launchctl on macOS or systemd on Linux), the claude binary may not be on the service's PATH. Set the CLAUDE_PATH environment variable to the absolute path of the binary.

macOS .plist:

<key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
<dict>
  <key>CLAUDE_PATH</key>
  <string>/Users/yourname/.local/bin/claude</string>
</dict>

Linux systemd unit:

[Service]
Environment=CLAUDE_PATH=/home/yourname/.local/bin/claude

Alternatively, adding the directory containing claude to the service's PATH also works — though CLAUDE_PATH is preferred as it grants access to only the one binary needed.

Tech Stack

• Next.js 15 — React framework
• React 19 — UI library
• Tailwind CSS — Styling
• better-sqlite3 — Local SQLite database
• TypeScript — Type safety

Disclaimer

This project was created in vibe coding mode, using Claude Code.

Licence

MIT