Introduction
claude-db gives Claude Code two things it does not have on its own: a memory of what you already explained, and a real graph of your code. Both run locally, against your own database.
The problem
You spent an hour yesterday explaining why the store uses three adapters, which approach you already tried and abandoned, and why one function must not be touched. Today Claude knows none of it, so you explain it again.
The other half is the codebase itself. Without an index, Claude re-derives it every time: grep a name, open four files, work out which hits were definitions and which were calls. You pay for that in tokens on every question.
What it does
Captures every turn that changed something
Claude Code already writes each session to disk as JSONL. claude-db reads that transcript, so it records why you did something, not just which files changed.
Injects the best match on every prompt
Capture and recall are hooks, so neither depends on Claude deciding to look something up. You never run a search command.
Answers questions about symbols from a graph
One scan stores every symbol and every relationship: what calls what, what imports what, what extends what.
npm install -g claude-db
cd your-project
claude-db install --projectRestart Claude Code and it is running. The rest of these docs cover what that install writes, how to map your code, and every command and MCP tool you get.
What it is not
It is not a cloud service and it is not an account. There is no telemetry, no sign-up, and nothing
leaves your machine unless you deliberately point it at a remote database. It also does not replace
CLAUDE.md: a stable overview of your project belongs there, while claude-db stores the things that
actually happened.
Requirements
Node 22.5 or newer. That is the only hard requirement. SQLite comes from Node's builtin
node:sqlite, and the parser ships as a prebuilt binary, so nothing compiles at install time.
Better embeddings, optional
Embeddings run locally with a zero-dependency embedder at 256 dimensions. For real semantic search,
npm install @xenova/transformers and it upgrades itself to 384. See Databases
for what that changes.