{"slug": "reinstalling-your-claude-code-environment-on-a-new-machine", "title": "Reinstalling your Claude Code environment on a new machine", "summary": "A developer detailed how to rebuild a complete Claude Code environment on a new machine by leveraging files stored in the `~/.claude/` directory. The global `CLAUDE.md`, reference guides, custom commands, and statusline configurations all live in files that can be restored with a single prompt, provided the prompt was prepared in advance. The developer also shared a custom statusline script that displays real-time token consumption and context usage, which is available on GitHub.", "body_md": "New machine. Install Claude Code. And then: Claude knows nothing. The development rules encoded in the global CLAUDE.md, the reference guides, the statusline displaying token consumption in real time, the plugins — all of it stayed on the old machine.\n\nThe bad news: none of this syncs automatically. The good news: everything lives in files. A single prompt can rebuild the complete environment in minutes — provided you prepared that prompt in advance.\n\nThe Claude Code global environment is concentrated in one folder: `~/.claude/`\n\n. What you'll find there:\n\n`CLAUDE.md`\n\n— global instructions: how to work, which rules apply across all projects`settings.json`\n\n— technical configuration: permissions, statusline, hooks`hooks/`\n\n— scripts executed on Claude Code events`commands/`\n\n— custom slash commands (`/audit-memory`\n\n, etc.)`memory/`\n\n— global memories`projects/<cwd>/memory/`\n\n— per-project memoriesThis folder is neither versioned nor synced by default. Change machines, and the folder disappears. Everything you built over sessions goes with it.\n\nReference files you store there — development guides, language-specific best practices — aren't auto-loaded. Claude reads them only when explicitly asked. They don't survive a machine change without manual intervention either.\n\n`~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`\n\nis loaded in every session, across all projects. This is where you encode what must apply everywhere: how Claude should work, which restrictions are active, how commits should be written, how automatic memory works.\n\nIt's also the hardest file to reconstruct from memory — because every rule it contains came from a concrete experience. A commit convention encoded after discovering what you didn't want in messages. A restriction on `.env`\n\nfiles added after an incident. A context economy principle that took weeks to calibrate.\n\nThe structure that works well in practice:\n\nTarget: under 100 lines. Beyond that, the file starts loading irrelevant context for most tasks. Rarely-useful sections (Go best practices, detailed development guide) go into separate files referenced as plain text.\n\nSome knowledge is too voluminous for the main CLAUDE.md but too specific for a project CLAUDE.md. The solution: reference files in `~/.claude/`\n\n, read on demand.\n\nConcrete examples:\n\n`DEVELOPPEMENT-PROPRE.md`\n\n— core principles: YAGNI, robustness/testability/simplicity triangle, code review checklist, anti-patterns to avoid`go-best-practices.md`\n\n— Go-specific patterns with code examples: error handling, concurrency, PostgreSQL, table-driven testing, structured loggingThe global CLAUDE.md only contains a reference line:\n\n```\nDevelopment Guide: `~/.claude/DEVELOPPEMENT-PROPRE.md`\nGo Best Practices (patterns, code examples): `~/.claude/go-best-practices.md`\n```\n\nClaude reads these files when relevant to the task. The rest of the time, they take no context space.\n\nClaude Code supports a configurable statusline in `~/.claude/settings.json`\n\n. A second file, `settings.local.json`\n\n(not versioned), handles tool permissions — what can run without confirmation, what's blocked. Keeping them separate avoids exposing your permissions in a shared repo.\n\n```\n{\n  \"statusLine\": {\n    \"type\": \"command\",\n    \"command\": \"bash /home/YOUR_USER/.claude/hooks/statusline.sh\"\n  }\n}\n```\n\nThe script displays in the Claude Code bar information that isn't available natively: context consumption as a percentage, remaining token estimate, current git branch.\n\n```\n🌿 main │ 🤖 Sonnet 4.6 │ 🟢 Ctx: ▓▓░░░░░░ 34% │ ⏱ 46% → 19h00 (3h20m) │ 📅 ~59% (Mon 14h)\n```\n\nThe script scrapes the `/usage`\n\nendpoint in background via tmux, caching results for 5 minutes in `~/.claude/usage-exact.json`\n\n. Requirements: `bash 4+`\n\n, `jq`\n\n, `tmux`\n\n, `python3`\n\n. The full script is available on [GitHub](https://github.com/ohugonnot/coder-proprement).\n\nWithout this script, the only consumption indicator is the progress bar in the interface — no percentage, no estimate.\n\nClaude Code supports a plugin (skills) system that enriches sessions with specialized workflows. They install via:\n\n```\nclaude plugins install <plugin-name>\n```\n\nPlugins that genuinely change how you work:\n\nThey reinstall with a single command. The only prerequisite is having the list of plugins you were using — hence the value of noting it down before switching machines.\n\nProject memories (`~/.claude/projects/<cwd>/memory/`\n\n) don't always need to be manually migrated. They age quickly — *project* type memories especially. Reopening a project in a fresh environment is an opportunity to let them rebuild naturally, session by session, with up-to-date information.\n\nWhat's worth migrating first: global memories (`~/.claude/memory/`\n\n). These are cross-project preferences — the user profile (technical level, knowledge domains), feedback that applies to all projects (expected response style, communication rules). This information takes time to rebuild because it comes from experience accumulated across multiple projects.\n\nFor feedback memories especially: each rule encodes a past correction. \"Don't summarize what we just did at the end of the message\" — Claude needs to be corrected several times before it makes it into a memory. On a new environment without that memory, you start those corrections from scratch.\n\nThe real solution to this problem isn't syncing files — it's having a bootstrap prompt that recreates everything from scratch. A document containing:\n\n`~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`\n\n`settings.json`\n\nconfigurationGive this document to Claude on the new environment with the instruction \"recreate all of this.\" Claude creates the files, configures the settings, installs what it can install. In 10 minutes, the environment is functional. The associated CLAUDE.md context below *is* that document — it contains the exact content of all three `~/.claude/`\n\nfiles, the memories to restore, and the verification checklist.\n\nThe advantage over file sync: it's an opportunity to review and update. A bootstrap prompt maintained over time reflects the actual current state of what you want — not a frozen snapshot of the old machine.\n\nThe associated CLAUDE.md context at the bottom of this page contains a complete concrete example: the global CLAUDE.md, `settings.json`\n\nconfiguration, plugin list, and a post-installation verification checklist.\n\nEverything Claude knows about how you want to work lives in files. Those files don't sync, don't back up, and don't survive a machine change without conscious intervention.\n\nThe discipline required: treat `~/.claude/`\n\nlike dotfiles — something you version, maintain, and know how to restore completely from scratch. The associated CLAUDE.md context below contains the complete bootstrap prompt.\n\n**📄 Associated CLAUDE.md**", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reinstalling-your-claude-code-environment-on-a-new-machine", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/ohugonnot/reinstalling-your-claude-code-environment-on-a-new-machine-2hpg", "published_at": "2026-05-26 09:00:03+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-26 09:04:04.829581+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "ai-agents", "large-language-models", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Claude Code", "Claude"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reinstalling-your-claude-code-environment-on-a-new-machine", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reinstalling-your-claude-code-environment-on-a-new-machine.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reinstalling-your-claude-code-environment-on-a-new-machine.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reinstalling-your-claude-code-environment-on-a-new-machine.jsonld"}}