Use your main setup in every member

You keep one setup, your main ~/.claude, and every member uses it. Before every launch crewrota links each member’s skills, agents and commands to yours, links your plugin folders, and copies your settings.json and CLAUDE.md into the member. Install a skill or plugin once in your main Claude Code and every member has it at its next launch.

What each member gets

From ~/.claude	How	When you change it
skills/, agents/, commands/	Linked (a junction on Windows, a symlink elsewhere)	Every member sees it at once
plugins/cache, plugins/data, plugins/marketplaces	Linked	Every member sees it at once
plugins/installed_plugins.json, blocklist.json, install-counts-cache.json	Copied	At each member’s next launch
plugins/known_marketplaces.json	Copied, with each install path pointed at the member’s own plugins folder	At each member’s next launch
settings.json, CLAUDE.md	Copied	At each member’s next launch

Only what exists in ~/.claude is linked or copied. A member’s login, history and .claude.json stay its own.

MCP servers come from the member’s ship, not from ~/.claude; see Give a ship’s members the same MCP servers.

Your main setup is read, never written

crewrota only reads ~/.claude and ~/.claude.json. The one exception is crew restore, which adds skills, agents, commands and CLAUDE.md to ~/.claude without overwriting a file. Nothing ever writes to ~/.claude.json.

So:

• Install plugins in your main Claude Code (claude plugin install ...), not inside a member.
• Edit ~/.claude/settings.json or ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, not the member’s copies; a member’s copy is replaced at its next launch.
• crewrota never writes through a link. If a member’s settings.json, CLAUDE.md, .claude.json or plugins is itself a link, the launch stops with <file> is a link, and crewrota only writes a member's own files. Remove the link and launch again.

A member that had its own plugins

The first time a member uses your main plugins, crewrota moves its own plugins folder aside and says so: [i] This member now uses your main plugins. Its own plugins folder is kept at <member folder>/plugins.before-crewrota-<date>

Nothing is deleted; remove that folder yourself once you are sure you do not need it.

When a link cannot be made

If the member has its own non-empty skills, agents or commands folder where the link should go, the launch stops with <member folder>/skills is in the way of the link to ~/.claude/skills. Move it somewhere else and launch again. Nothing launched.

An empty folder is replaced by the link without asking. crew doctor shows each link’s state: linked to your main setup, is linked at the next launch, is a folder, not a link, points at a folder that does not exist or points at a different folder. See Fix a problem with crew doctor.

The status line

Claude Code shows a status line under the prompt. A member whose settings.json has no statusLine gets crewrota’s at launch:

{
  "statusLine": {
    "type": "command",
    "command": "crewrota statusline"
  }
}

Since settings.json is copied from ~/.claude first, a status line in your main settings wins, and crewrota adds nothing.

crew statusline prints one line: the model, a context bar, the git branch, 5-hour and week use, the 5-hour reset with a countdown, the folder and the crew member. From a demo session, with NO_COLOR set:

Opus 5.5 (1M) | ███░░░░░░░ 37% |  main | 5h:42% | 7d:63% | ↻ 15:30 (0m) | crewrota | crew team

• Colours: green under 50%, yellow from 50%, red from 80%. These differ from the usage bars elsewhere, which turn amber at 60%.
• NO_COLOR turns colour off and separates the parts with |.
• It never fails, so the status line never shows an error.
• Each time it runs it saves the session’s usage to the member’s quota.json, which the crew menu, crew list, the widget and the menu bar read. An older session cannot overwrite a newer reading.

To use your own status line in every member, set statusLine in ~/.claude/settings.json. Your own status line does not save readings for crewrota; the crew menu and crew quota still take their own with quota-axi.

Related

• What happens when a member launches
• Members, ships and your main setup
• Usage commands, in full