[BUG] `claude` on Mac deletes the `.credentials.json` file that `claude` on Linux uses

Thanks for the report! This is intended behavior (cleaning up plain text credentials when successfully storing them in macos keychain), but would be curious to hear about your workflow. Would running inside the container with a different CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR path work for you?

This is intended behavior (cleaning up plain text credentials when successfully storing them in macos keychain)

ok — though that means it's not possible to run in a container without logging in on each switch to & back

Would running inside the container with a different CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR path work for you?

I can mount a different path — ~/.claude-linux:~/.claude and have a task which copies over my CLAUDE.md to ~/.claude-linux/ at some frequency I guess? doesn't seem ideal

or if claude is going to clean up things it doesn't use from other OSs, should it put them in OS-specific paths, such as ~/.claude/linux/.credentials.json...

have a task which copies over my CLAUDE.md to ~/.claude-linux/ at some frequency

You can use CLAUDE.md imports instead of copying over (i.e. have container dir's CLAUDE.md import your main one)!

but the current state of claude prevents mounting ~/.claude into the container! so ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md isn't then available in the container

does that make sense?

(unless it's a proposal to have two mounts to differently named locations and then map one back into the other with an import that's invalid on the host)

you could create a CLAUDE.md file inside your container mounted dir and then @- import it from ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md to avoid needing two mounts

This sounds like a lot of workarounds for what I'm guessing would actually be a really simple fix in claude code :(. Just give us a config parameter to set so ~/claude/.credentials.json isn't deleted or give us a CLAUDE_CREDENTIALS_FILE env var that we can use in container configs so that we can use ~/.claude/.container-credentials.json as the credentials file.

As for use case, I do almost all of my dev work in devcontainers. This is an example config of how I've got things setup to use claude code. Copy this json to ${mydir}/.devcontainer/devcontainer.json, load ${mydir} in vscode, and then have vscode load up the devcontainer.

{
  "name": "Claude Code Devcontainer Example",
  "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:bookworm",
  "mounts": [
    {
      "source": "${localEnv:HOME}/.claude/",
      "target": "/home/vscode/.claude",
      "type": "bind"
    },
    {
      "source": "${localEnv:HOME}/.claude.json",
      "target": "/home/vscode/.claude.json",
      "type": "bind"
    }
  ],
  "features": {
    "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/node:1": {}
  },
  "onCreateCommand": "npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code"
}

I know devcontainer users are in the minority, but considering you guys maintain a devcontainer feature (https://github.com/anthropics/devcontainer-features/tree/main), it would be really nice if we didn't have to re-login due to the credentials getting deleted on the host machine.

any news?

@levpopov this should be reopened. Using containers to isolate Claude code instances is becoming more popular. The current behaviour is problematic for people using these flows. Either fix this, or, ideally, provide a way for M2M authentication so we don't need to rely on that file.

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