You Should Be Versioning Your ~/.claude Config

27 Feb 2026 · 1 min read

If you’ve been using Claude Code for a while, you’ve probably accumulated a decent amount of configuration: settings, skills, custom agents, CLAUDE.md instructions. Losing all of that would be annoying.

The fix: git init inside ~/.claude, with some caveats.

What lives in ~/.claude

Based on the official docs, here’s what’s worth versioning:

CLAUDE.md
settings.json
skills/**/SKILL.md
agents/<name>.md
commands/<name>.md
statusline.sh

What to ignore

Claude Code generates transient data that you should ignore. Add this to your .gitignore.

# Credentials
.credentials.json
credentials.json

# Internal state
.claude.json
.claude.json.backup.*
security_warnings_*.json
stats-cache.json
mcp-needs-auth-cache.json

# Session data
history.jsonl
backups
cache
debug
file-history
paste-cache
session-env
shell-snapshots

# Agent and team state
plans
plugins
tasks
teams
todos

# Telemetry
statsig
telemetry
usage-data

# IDE integration
ide/

Note about projects

The projects/ directory contains per-project auto-memory and conversation logs. Claude Code recently enabled memory per project, which is worth adding to git. The easiest approach is to ignore the log files instead:

projects/**/*.jsonl
projects/**/*.txt

Quick setup

Remember to push it to GitHub or GitLab, below is an example with GitHub:

cd ~/.claude
git init
git add .gitignore CLAUDE.md settings.json
git add skills/ agents/ commands/ statusline.sh 2>/dev/null
git commit -m "feat: initial claude config"
gh repo create claude-config --private --source=. --push

That’s it.