Pulse – a local dashboard for Claude Code, approve tool calls from your phone

Developer Nikita Doudikov released Pulse, a local dashboard for Claude Code that displays token spend, session context, and allows users to approve tool calls from their phone. The open-source tool runs entirely on the user's machine with no telemetry or network calls, and includes features like session recovery, full-text search, and budget alerts.

A local dashboard for Claude Code that shows what Claude is doing, what it is spending, and lets you approve its tool calls from your phone. Zero dependencies, nothing leaves your machine. Claude Code already writes every session to disk. Pulse reads those files read only and turns them into a live dashboard: token spend by hour, day and week, the context fill of your active session, an ambient view of Claude at work, full-text search across everything you have ever run, and a notification with Allow / Allow all / Deny buttons when Claude needs you, on your desktop or your phone. No account, no telemetry, no network calls. Approve from your phone. A push with working Allow / Allow all / Deny buttons. No Wi-Fi setup, no IP, no open port: it works from anywhere, even on cellular. Never lose a session. One command recovers your last session as a readable transcript, and Pulse auto-snapshots active ones, so a crash or a frozen laptop never costs you context. See the spend. Live tokens and API-equivalent cost by hour, day, week, model and project, against budgets you set, with a phone alert when you cross one. Ambient office. A full-screen view of a little mascot working, resting, or waiting on you, with a rough ETA. Quietly addictive on a second monitor. Search everything. Full-text search across every session on disk, one click to the transcript. Local and private. Reads ~/.claude read only, serves on 127.0.0.1 , zero dependencies, no telemetry. | Ambient office view | Approve from the dashboard or your phone | |---|---| Requires Node 18+. git clone https://github.com/nikitadoudikov/claude-pulse.git cd claude-pulse node bin/cli.js That opens http://127.0.0.1:4317 . To get desktop and phone notifications and to approve tool calls, wire the hooks one command, safe to re-run : node bin/cli.js install-hooks adds the hooks to ~/.claude/settings.json Then restart Claude Code, and you are set. Other options: claude-pulse --port 4317 change the port claude-pulse --no-open do not open the browser Run in the foreground and Pulse dies when you close that terminal. To keep it alive independently, run it in the background: claude-pulse start run detached, survives closing the terminal claude-pulse status is it running? claude-pulse stop stop it claude-pulse restart stop and start again If your terminal crashes, claude-pulse start brings it back in one command, and a background instance is not affected by the crash in the first place. On macOS you can hand Pulse to the system so it starts at login and respawns itself if it ever dies: claude-pulse install-service start at login, auto-restart claude-pulse uninstall-service remove it Terminal crashed, laptop froze, hit a session limit? Nothing is lost: Claude Code writes every session to disk as it happens. One command brings the last one back, prints a recap and saves a readable transcript: claude-pulse recover the most recent session claude-pulse recover 2 the one before that claude-pulse recover <id a specific session It saves a light markdown file under ~/.claude-pulse/exports/ a 15 MB log becomes a ~180 KB file and prints a link to read the full transcript in the browser or on your phone. You can also open any session in the dashboard and use open transcript / download .md . While Pulse runs it also auto-snapshots every recently active session to ~/.claude-pulse/exports/snapshots/ one file per session, rewritten only when it changes . So the latest state is always on disk even if you never run recover . Set snapshotMinutes to 0 in ~/.claude-pulse.json to turn it off. To back up everything at once, claude-pulse export-all writes every session into a single small gzipped markdown file, or use download all history on the Sessions screen. Lost where you did something? The Sessions screen has a search box that scans every session on disk for a word or phrase and jumps you straight to the transcript. It works from your phone too. The simplest phone control is the ntfy notification itself: it carries working Allow / Allow all / Deny buttons see above , no network setup at all. For a richer view, open http://<your-machine :4317/phone on the same Wi-Fi needs bindLan: true to see what Claude is doing right now plus a Pause / Resume button. Pausing stops Claude from running further tools until you resume. Both need the PreToolUse hook wired. ┌──────────────┐ writes .jsonl ┌──────────────────────┐ SSE ┌──────────────┐ │ Claude Code │ ─────────────────▶ │ Pulse read only │ ───────▶ │ dashboard │ │ terminal │ │ 127.0.0.1:4317 │ │ + phone │ └──────┬───────┘ └──────────────────────┘ └──────────────┘ │ │ hooks: Notification · Stop · PreToolUse ▼ ┌─────────────────────────────┐ │ ~/.claude-pulse/ │ pending approvals · decisions · events └─────────────────────────────┘ Claude Code logs every session as JSONL under ~/.claude/projects/ . Each assistant message carries a usage block input, output and cache tokens with a timestamp. Pulse reads those files read only , caches each file by modification time so unchanged sessions are never re-parsed, and aggregates the numbers. The browser gets live updates over Server-Sent Events. Three small hooks let Claude Code tell Pulse when it needs you, when a turn ends, and when it wants to run a tool. Claude Code can run a hook when it needs your attention. Point its Notification event at the bundled script and Pulse will show a banner and fire a desktop notification, even if the tab is in the background. The easy way is one command: claude-pulse install-hooks wires the hooks into ~/.claude/settings.json safe to re-run claude-pulse uninstall-hooks removes them It backs up your settings once, merges next to any hooks you already have, and never adds a duplicate. Restart Claude Code afterwards. To do it by hand instead, add this to ~/.claude/settings.json use the absolute path to your clone : { "hooks": { "Notification": { "matcher": "", "hooks": { "type": "command", "command": "node /absolute/path/to/claude-pulse/hooks/notify-hook.js" } } , "Stop": { "matcher": "", "hooks": { "type": "command", "command": "node /absolute/path/to/claude-pulse/hooks/stop-hook.js" } } , "PreToolUse": { "matcher": "", "hooks": { "type": "command", "command": "node /absolute/path/to/claude-pulse/hooks/permission-hook.js" } } } } Keep claude-pulse running and you are set. With the PreToolUse hook wired, when Claude wants to run something that needs permission, an approval card appears in Pulse with Allow , Allow all and Deny . Allow all stops asking for the rest of the run. This is built to never hang Claude. Read only tools pass straight through, and if Pulse is not running, has not heard from you within the approval timeout 60s by default, set approvalTimeoutMs , or hits any error, it falls back to the normal terminal prompt. Nothing breaks if you ignore it. The phone push carries Allow , Allow all and Deny buttons. To approve from your phone, you only need an ntfyTopic below and the ntfy app. The push notification carries Allow , Allow all and Deny buttons, and tapping one sends the answer back through ntfy to a private reply topic that Pulse listens on. No same Wi-Fi, no IP, no open port: it works from anywhere, even on cellular. Pulse only acts on a reply while it is actually waiting for that request, so a stale notification can do nothing. Claude wants to run a tool │ ▼ PreToolUse hook ──▶ Pulse ──push──▶ phone notification │ │ │ tap "Allow" │ │ │ answer returns over ntfy │ │ ▼ ▼ hook is still waiting ◀── decision ◀── Pulse subscribed to the reply topic │ ▼ hook returns "allow" ──▶ Claude runs the tool To get a push on your phone when Claude needs you or finishes, pick a hard to guess topic name, install the free ntfy https://ntfy.sh app and subscribe to that topic, then set it in ~/.claude-pulse.json : { "ntfyTopic": "claude-pulse-9f3a7c" } With the hooks above wired, the Notification hook pushes when Claude is waiting for you, and the Stop hook pushes when a turn finishes debounced to 30s so a back and forth does not spam you . Anyone who knows the topic can read it, so use a random name. If you set budgets below , Pulse also pushes when a rolling window crosses 80% then 100% of its budget, so you find out from your pocket, not by checking. Copy config.example.json to ~/.claude-pulse.json and edit. Every field is optional. { "plan": "max20", "contextLimit": 200000, "idleMinutes": 10, "approvalTimeoutMs": 60000, "budgets": { "fiveHour": 140, "day": 360, "week": 1100 } } Anthropic does not publish exact subscription limits, and they are usage based rather than a fixed token count. Pulse cannot read your real plan ceiling, so the budgets above are rough API-equivalent estimates you adjust to match what you observe. The pro , max5 and max20 presets are starting points, not official numbers. Token cost is estimated from public API list prices purely as a usage proxy; subscription users do not pay per token. Pulse is local-first and opt-in. Out of the box it binds to 127.0.0.1 only, makes no outbound calls, has zero dependencies no supply chain , and reads ~/.claude read only. Nothing leaves your machine and there is no analytics. Two optional features change that, and both are off until you turn them on: Phone push routes through the public ntfyTopic ntfy.sh https://ntfy.sh relay. Approval prompts with a short command summary and your taps pass through a topic you name, so anyone who learns the topic can read those prompts and answer them. Use a long random topic, and self-host ntfy or use ntfy access tokens if you want stronger guarantees. Pulse only acts on a reply while it is genuinely waiting for that exact request, so a stale or guessed message cannot approve anything by itself. LAN access binds the server to your whole network so a phone on the same Wi-Fi can open the live bindLan /phone page. While it is on, other devices on that network can also read the dashboard and your transcripts, so only enable it on a network you trust. You do not need it for phone approvals those go through ntfy , so most people should leave it off. Runtime state, the device token and your config live in your home directory under ~/.claude-pulse/ , and are never committed or sent anywhere. MIT