chat-recall

[chatrecall.dev](https://chatrecall.dev) · How it works · MCP tools · Pricing · Self-host · Security

Turn what your AI coding tools already write into shared team knowledge, leaked-secret alerts, ranked code findings and tracked tasks.

Your agents wrote it all down. Nobody read it.

Every coding agent you run keeps a full transcript of its work: the decisions, the reasoning, the keys somebody pasted, the problems it found and never filed. Each one writes to its own directory in its own format, none can read another's, and nothing reads any of them. chat-recall does, through 68 MCP tools.

Underneath all four is one index of every session your tools already wrote, and 28 more tools to search, replay and diff it. That index is the mechanism. It is not the pitch, and it is not why anyone buys this.

The cross-tool part is what makes it work. A single tool's built-in history stops at its own boundary. This does not, and neither does your team.

See it work

Every screen below is real output against a real server, captured from the demo account. Nothing is mocked, replayed or re-timed.

One index, every tool. Search finds a session by what was *discussed* in it, not by its filename, and memory status shows every source type in one place — sessions beside the skills, MCPs, commands, subagents and hooks that produced them.

Or just ask in plain English — no tool names, no session ids. The agent picks the call itself:

It also finds the credentials you pasted, and checks which ones still work. A dead key is hygiene. A live one is an incident, and only live ones raise an alert.

Install

npx chat-recall init

That indexes the transcripts already on your disk, detects which AI tools you have, and registers the MCP server in each of their configs:

It only touches a config whose tool is on this machine, it never overwrites an entry you curated by hand, and chat-recall doctor prints one line per tool so a missing registration is visible. Inside Claude Code you can install the skills and the MCP server together instead:

/plugin marketplace add munhq/chat-recall

/plugin install chat-recall@chat-recall

Any other MCP client (Claude Desktop, Windsurf, Zed, Cline, or a tool init does not know) takes the same server as a JSON entry. The bin is chat-recall-mcp, which is why the package name alone is not enough — npx -y chat-recall starts the CLI, not the server:

{

"mcpServers": { "chat-recall": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "-p", "chat-recall", "chat-recall-mcp"] } } }

The same command as one line, for a claude mcp add-style client: npx -y -p chat-recall chat-recall-mcp.

Then:

chat-recall search "that auth bug"      # search everything you have ever done

chat-recall recent # what was I working on

By default this syncs to the hosted server at chatrecall.dev, which starts with a 7-day trial that needs no card and is a paid subscription after that — see pricing. To keep everything on your own machine instead, run the server yourself: that is free for one person, forever, with every feature and no licence key — the task board and Toolkit included — and a licence only buys collaboration: a second member, shared history, assigning work. See Self-host below. Either way the CLI is the same binary and the same commands; only the server URL differs.

No API keys are required. Search is Postgres full-text search. AI summaries are an optional upgrade, not a prerequisite.

What never leaves your machine

It indexes every AI session on this disk, so init shows you what would upload — count, tools, and the projects by name — and waits for a yes before the first sync. (--yes, or no TTY, prints the same summary and proceeds; --skip-sync holds the upload back entirely.) Secrets are masked client-side and project paths are sent as hashes; on top of that you choose what is in scope at all:

chat-recall exclude project ~/work/client   # a path, and everything under it, never syncs

chat-recall exclude tool cursor # one AI tool never syncs chat-recall sync-only add git:github.com/me/app # invert it: ship ONLY what you list chat-recall sources decline ~/.claude-work # a whole transcript profile stays out

(--delete-remote purges what it already sent)

chat-recall exclude list # every rule in force chat-recall delete # purge one session on every server, tombstoned chat-recall retention # how long the server keeps what you sent chat-recall retention set 90 # delete anything older, on a timer (0 = keep everything)

Some tools file transcripts under a hash rather than a project folder, so those sessions have no path for a path rule to match; exclude tool is the control that covers them, and init prints that count. A retention window deletes from the server on a timer. retention set prints how many sessions it would remove and makes you confirm the number. It is undoable only where the original transcript is still on a machine you have — widen the window and chat-recall sync --full re-ships what it admits. For a laptop you no longer own, history your AI tool rotated, or files you deleted, our copy is the only copy. Export first if you want one.

Exclusions live on the machine that holds the data, so the CLI owns them; they apply from the next sync, and rows already synced stay until deleted. The dashboard's Sync rules panel adds rules across every device — unioned with the local ones, so it can only ever add protection. Full model, limits included: Security.

Four things it actually does

1. Cross-tool unified memory. One index, one search, one UI over Claude Code (~/.claude/projects/), Codex (~/.codex/), OpenCode (~/.local/share/opencode/), Antigravity (~/.gemini/antigravity-cli/), Cursor (~/.cursor/ for the CLI, ~/.config/Cursor/ for the IDE), Hermes Agent (~/.hermes/) and Pi (~/.pi/agent/). Sessions, plans, tasks, CLAUDE.md files, paste cache, shell history and agent diaries all share one pluggable MemorySource interface.
2. The agent recalls itself. 68 MCP tools, so Claude Code can recall_smart_resume, recall_search (with like_session to find similar work), recall_edits_timeline, recall_subagent_search and recall_redundant_files rather than asking you what happened last time. It writes back too, via recall_decision_record, recall_kg_add and recall_set.
3. Warns before you redo work. A UserPromptSubmit hook searches for similar past sessions on every prompt and injects a short "you have done this before, in session X" note into the agent's context.
4. Temporal knowledge graph. Decisions and tool mentions become entity-relationship triples with valid_from/valid_to windows, so you can ask what was decided in March and whether it still holds.

Add your own AI tool

A new backend is one file and one line — no changes to the engine. If a tool you use writes transcripts to disk, it can be indexed here, and a pull request is the fastest way to make that happen.

Optional: web dashboard

The React dashboard is part of the server (SaaS or self-host docker compose) — the CLI itself has no UI. For dashboard development:

npm run web:install                 # install web deps

npm run web:dev # API on :5000, UI on :5174

Self-host the server (docker compose)

Everything on your own machine, no account, nothing sent anywhere:

git clone https://github.com/munhq/chat-recall && cd chat-recall

echo "ADMIN_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 24)" >> .env echo "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -hex 24)" >> .env docker compose up -d --build # FIRST RUN BUILDS FROM SOURCE (minutes)

Then mint a device token and connect a machine — the full sequence, with troubleshooting, is in [docs/SELF_HOSTING.md](docs/SELF_HOSTING.md).

Two containers: the server plus a bundled pgvector/pgvector Postgres, so a plain docker compose up is self-contained. Bring-your-own-Postgres is supported too (it is how the hosted service runs): set DATABASE_URL to an external Postgres 16+.

Keep the index live (+ optional server sync)

You do not need a daemon. Claude Code spawns the MCP server, and that process syncs every 3 minutes on its own — the binary is the daemon. For a headless box with no assistant running, opt in to a background service:

chat-recall watch                    # foreground daemon: watches every tool, summaries, precompute

chat-recall watch --install-service # systemd user unit (Linux) · launchd (macOS) · Scheduled Task (Windows)

init does not install it, on purpose. Both paths push through the same syncIncremental() under the same cross-platform index lock, so one writer touches the ledger at a time — see [docs/SYNC.md](docs/SYNC.md