Claude Recall in Claude Desktop
The killer integration. Claude Desktop natively supports MCP. Add the recall server and you can ask Claude things like “Which past session covered the postgres migration you wrote in March?” or “Pull in the context from session abc12345 and pick up from there.” Claude Desktop becomes the search-and-recall front end for your entire Claude Code history.
Setup
One config file edit. Restart the app. Done.
Config path
- macOS:
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json - Windows:
%APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
Block to add
{
"mcpServers": {
"recall": {
"command": "claude-recall-mcp"
}
}
}Then restart Claude Desktop. The MCP indicator at the bottom of the chat input should show “recall” in the connected list.
Try it
Three prompts to verify the integration works.
- What past Claude Code sessions do I have? List the most recent ten.
- Search my sessions for “migration rollback” and summarize what I tried.
- Pull in context from session abc12345 and continue from where it left off.
FAQ
What can Claude Desktop do with Claude Recall connected?
Search every past Claude Code session, recall a specific session into the current chat as context, find semantically similar past sessions, list and apply tags, browse projects, and read full conversation transcripts. Effectively, Claude Desktop becomes the front end for your entire Claude Code history.
Does this require a Claude Pro or Max subscription?
No, and these are two separate things worth keeping apart. Your Anthropic plan tier is not a gate here: MCP server support in Claude Desktop is available on any of them. Claude Recall has its own free local tier, and the `claude-recall-mcp` server configured on this page runs on it: keyword search, listing and reading sessions, transcripts, projects, tags, threads and pulling a session in as context all work with no license. What needs Claude Recall Pro, a one-time purchase rather than a subscription, is the semantic half: finding semantically similar sessions, and semantic mode in search, which without Pro returns an upgrade notice and falls back to keyword results. Note that the separate `recall mcp` CLI shim does require Pro to start, so configure `claude-recall-mcp` as shown above.
Where does the data live?
Local SQLite at ~/.recall/. The recall MCP server reads only that database. Claude Code session JSONLs at ~/.claude/projects/ are read-only inputs; Claude Recall never writes to them.
Last updated September 2026