Members, ships and your main setup

A crew member is a Claude Code config folder with one login in it; crewrota starts Claude Code with CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR set to that folder. A ship is a folder of shared history that several members link to. Your main ~/.claude stays yours: every member links to its skills, agents, commands and plugins, and gets a copy of its settings, but crewrota never writes to it.

The picture

~/.claude/                          your main setup, read only for crewrota
  skills/ agents/ commands/
  plugins/  settings.json  CLAUDE.md

~/.crewrota/                        the crew home
  members/
    main/                           CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR when main runs
      .claude.json                  main's login details and identity
      quota.json                    main's last usage reading
      skills/ agents/ commands/     -> links to ~/.claude/<name>
      plugins/                      cache, data, marketplaces -> links to ~/.claude/plugins/<name>
      settings.json  CLAUDE.md      copies of ~/.claude/<name>, made at each launch
      projects/ todos/ file-history/ session-env/ shell-snapshots/
                                    -> links to ships/home/<name>
    side/                           the same layout, its own login
  ships/
    home/
      projects/ todos/ file-history/ session-env/ shell-snapshots/
      mcp.json                      the ship's MCP servers, with their keys
  shortcuts/                        VS Code workspace files
  removed/                          dropped members and deleted ships

On Windows the crew home is %USERPROFILE%\.crewrota and links are junctions; elsewhere they are symlinks. CREWROTA_HOME moves the crew home. The settings file, config.json, lives apart from the crew home: %APPDATA%\crewrota\ on Windows, ~/.config/crewrota/ elsewhere.

A member

A member is a folder under members/ and an entry in config.json. The folder is a full Claude Code config folder: Claude Code keeps the member’s login, its .claude.json and its sessions there. The entry holds the member’s ship, model and effort.

• Its login is its own. Claude Code’s login writes it there, and crewrota never copies or moves it.
• Its identity (email and organisation) is read from oauthAccount in its .claude.json.
• Its usage reading is quota.json.

See Add and manage crew members.

A ship

A ship is a folder under ships/ with the five folders Claude Code keeps a session’s history in, projects, todos, file-history, session-env and shell-snapshots, plus an mcp.json. projects holds the session transcripts, one folder per project path.

A member on a ship has those five folders as links to the ship’s. Every member on the ship reads and writes the same files, so a session one member starts, another can resume. A member on no ship is isolated: the five are its own folders.

The ship’s mcp.json lists its MCP servers, and each member gets that list at launch.

See Share history between members with a ship.

Your main setup

Everything you install in your main Claude Code reaches every member:

• skills, agents, commands, and the plugin cache, data and marketplaces, are links, so a change shows at once.
• settings.json, CLAUDE.md and the plugin lists are copied at every launch.

See Use your main setup in every member.

What crewrota never does

• Never copies or moves a login; to read usage, quota-axi uses each member’s own sign-in on your machine.
• Never writes to ~/.claude.json, and writes to ~/.claude only in crew restore, adding files without overwriting.
• Never deletes a member or a ship: crew drop and crew ship delete remove the links first, then move the folder to removed/.
• Never writes through a link.

Related

• What happens when a member launches
• Files and folders