- Branko, you built another tool?
Yes. Yes I did. And before you roll your eyes — hear me out, because this one scratched an itch that was driving me genuinely crazy.
I run Claude Code on three machines. My laptop. My desktop. My work box. And every single one of them had its own little personality. A CLAUDE.md from two weeks ago on one. A skill I wrote on Tuesday that simply did not exist on the other two. A plugin installed here but not there.
You know the feeling. You sit down at the other machine, go to use that clever little skill you made, and… nothing. It’s not there. It’s on the laptop. The laptop that is currently at home. On your desk. Mocking you.
So I built ClaudeSync.
“Just use a git repo” — yeah, I tried
I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too. Put ~/.claude in a git repo and be done with it.
And sure. That works. Until you forget to commit. Until you forget to pull. Until a plugin file has /Users/branko/... baked into it and breaks the moment it lands on a machine where you are not, in fact, branko.
And then there’s the part nobody mentions: git diff on a folder full of JSON and markdown is not what I’d call a pleasant afternoon. I wanted to see what was different before I synced it. Like a normal person.
Generic dotfile tools? Same story. They don’t know what Claude Code is. They see files. They don’t see “oh, this is a plugin manifest, that means somebody should run claude plugin install.” I wanted something that actually gets it.
The one decision I’m most proud of
No background file watcher.
Let me say that again because it sounds like a missing feature and it absolutely is not: ClaudeSync does not watch your files and sync them automatically.
Here’s why. Auto-sync sounds lovely right up until you’re halfway through editing a file, the watcher wakes up, and a half-written mess gets pushed everywhere. Or two machines touch the same file and one silently eats the other. For your AI coding setup — the thing that shapes how Claude behaves for you — I did not want surprises.
So every sync is a decision you make. You open the dashboard, hit “Discover”, and you get a nice file tree showing what changed — new files, modified files, badges and all. You tick the ones you want. You push. Nothing moves unless you told it to. Boring? Maybe. Predictable? Absolutely. I’ll take predictable.
So how does this thing actually work?
Three pieces. Stay with me.
One — a little Node agent that lives on each machine. It does not sit there polling or watching. It connects to Supabase Realtime and just… waits. Listens for orders.
Two — Supabase doing the heavy lifting. Postgres for the metadata, Storage for the actual file contents, Realtime for the command channel, Edge Functions for the API. The free tier carries all of it.
Three — a React dashboard on Netlify. This is the cockpit. Your devices show up here, and this is where you press the buttons.
The little trick I like: the dashboard never talks to the agent directly. It shouts into a Supabase Realtime channel, and the agent — subscribed to that channel — hears it. Which means the agent needs zero inbound network access. It’s behind your home router, behind your office firewall, doesn’t matter. It’s not listening for the world. It’s listening for one channel.
Dashboard Supabase Agent
| | |
|-- "Discover!" ----->|---- broadcast ---->| scans ~/.claude
| |<--- here's the diff |
|<-- file tree -------| |
| | |
|-- "Sync these" ---->|---- broadcast ---->| reads + pushes files
| | |
|-- "Send to box" --->|---- broadcast ---->| writes ~/.claude
| | | auto-installs plugins
The sneaky problem: paths
Here’s the bit that actually took thinking.
A plugin file or a settings file loves to contain a full, absolute path. Something like /Users/branko/.claude/skills/my-skill.
Beautiful. On my machine. Send that exact line to your machine and it’s nonsense — you’re not branko, and your Claude folder might live somewhere else entirely.
So before a file gets stored, ClaudeSync swaps the known path bits for placeholders — {{USER_HOME}}, {{CLAUDE_PATH}}, that kind of thing. Think of it as the file going into storage wearing a disguise. When it lands on another machine and gets pulled, the agent rips the disguise off and fills in that machine’s real values.
You never see any of it. The file just works. Different username, different home directory, different install location — it just works. That’s the whole point.
“But it’s holding my config — is that safe?”
Good. You should ask that. Anything touching ~/.claude should make you a little suspicious.
So — Row Level Security on every single table. Every query Postgres runs is locked to the user who made it. There is no clever path where your files and my files end up in the same bucket. It’s enforced down in the database, not up in some application code where one lazy bug leaks everything.
File contents sit in private storage. Downloads happen through short-lived signed URLs. The agent authenticates with a per-user token you can rotate or kill from the dashboard whenever you like. And the agent skips the obvious landmines by default — .env, *.key, *.pem — because your secrets have no business riding along.
And if you trust me exactly zero percent? Fair. Honestly, fair. The whole backend self-hosts on Supabase’s free tier in about ten minutes. Same code, your servers, your rules.
The funny part: I built the wrong feature first
I made this to keep my machines in sync. That was the goal. And it does that.
But two things showed up that I didn’t plan for, and they turned out to be the good stuff.
Setting up a fresh machine. New laptop, clean OS, an empty dev VM — install the agent, hit “Send files to this machine”, and your whole Claude Code world just… reappears. Plugins install themselves. That twenty-minute dance of copying dotfiles around? Gone. Down to about a minute of you watching a progress indicator.
Sharing a setup across a team. One account becomes the single source of truth. Everybody pulls the same approved skills and prompts. New teammate joins? You hand them one install command instead of a Notion page titled “please copy these into your CLAUDE.md, pretty please.”
The thing I built it for ended up being the least interesting thing it does. Funny how that goes.
Where it’s at
It’s AGPL-3.0, it’s open, PRs are very welcome. And let me be honest about the rough edges, because I’d rather you hear it from me:
- It’s one user per account right now. A proper team mode with roles is the next big thing on my list.
- Plugin auto-install only knows the public registry — no private team plugins yet.
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The hosted instance runs on free-tier Supabase, so if it gets hugged to death it will rate-limit. Self-host if you’re serious.
If you run Claude Code on more than one machine — or you’ve got a team all sharing prompts over Slack like cavemen — go kick the tires and tell me what’s broken. -
Try it: https://claudesync.netlify.app
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Issues, stars, opinions: https://github.com/LandB/claudesync
Thank you for reading, good people. ’til next time!
