I got tired of logging in and out of Claude Code, so I built a one-command account switcher

Quick confession: last week I logged out of my work Claude Code account four times in one afternoon. Nothing was broken. I just have a second account for personal projects, and Claude Code can only be logged into one of them at a time.

Sign in with the personal account and the work one is gone. Sign back in with work and personal is gone. Every switch is a browser tab, an OAuth dance and about forty seconds of my life. Multiply that by "I switch contexts a lot" and you get a genuinely annoying week.

So I fixed it. The result is cc-switch, and the whole thing is one command:

ccp use personal

Every claude you launch after that runs under the personal account. ccp use work flips it back. No re-login, no browser, no forty seconds. And ccp list tells you who is who:

  Claude Code profiles
  --------------------
  * default                   [email protected]
    personal   [shared]       [email protected]
    client-x   [isolated]     [email protected]

The trick is a single environment variable

I expected to need something hacky with credential files. I didn't. Claude Code reads an environment variable called CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR and uses it as the root for everything it stores: credentials, settings, session transcripts, the lot. Point it at a different folder and you get a completely separate identity.

So a "profile" in cc-switch is literally a directory:

~/.claude-profiles/
  personal/    ← its own login
  client-x/    ← its own login
~/.claude      ← your original account, untouched ("default")

ccp use <name> sets the variable for the current shell and persists it for new terminals. ccp run <name> sets it for a single invocation only, which means two terminals can talk to two different accounts at the same time:

# terminal 1
ccp run work

# terminal 2
ccp run personal -p "summarise yesterday's changes"

I use that far more than I expected to.

Then I lost all my chats

The first version worked great for about ten minutes. Then I opened a project under the personal profile and my conversation history was empty. Of course it was: transcripts live in projects/ inside the config dir, and the new profile had its own brand new, empty one.

For some setups that's exactly what you want (a clean-room profile for a client). For my day-to-day it was terrible. I wanted the login separated, not my memory of what I was doing yesterday.

The fix turned out to be clean. On a shared profile, cc-switch replaces the chat folders (projects/, sessions/, plans/, tasks/, file-history/) and history.jsonl with links back into ~/.claude: NTFS junctions and a hardlink on Windows, plain symlinks on Linux and macOS. Credentials and settings stay per profile, chats are one pool, and claude --resume shows the same list whichever account you're on.

If you do want a walled-off environment, you just say so:

ccp add client-x --isolated

You can flip a profile between the two modes later with ccp link and ccp unlink. Nothing gets deleted either way: unlink gives the profile its own empty folders and leaves the shared history where it is.

The bug that would have deleted everything

This is the part I actually want people to read, because it's a general Windows/PowerShell gotcha.

My first ccp remove was the obvious thing: Remove-Item -Recurse -Force <profile dir>. On a shared profile, that directory is full of junctions pointing at ~/.claude. And Remove-Item -Recurse will happily walk straight through a junction and delete the contents of the target.

In other words, "remove the test profile" would have wiped my entire real chat history. I only caught it because I was being paranoid in testing: I made a throwaway profile and counted the project folders on both sides before and after. The fix is to delete the links themselves first (DirectoryInfo.Delete() on a junction removes only the reparse point, not what it points to) and then recurse into whatever is left. rm -rf on Linux doesn't follow symlinks, so the bash version was never at risk, but it does the same explicit dance anyway.

If you write any tool that creates junctions on Windows: test your delete path against a directory you'd be sad to lose. I got lucky. You might not.

Install it

One line, no clone:

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/petersonsenadevs/claude-code-switch/main/install.ps1 | iex

Linux / macOS

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/petersonsenadevs/claude-code-switch/main/install.sh | bash

Then:

ccp add personal          # new profile, shares your chats
ccp login personal        # opens claude: sign in, then /exit
ccp use personal          # you're switched
ccp list                  # every profile, with the email signed in on each

It's plain shell (a PowerShell module and a bash script) with no dependencies and no daemon. It doesn't wrap or patch claude; it only sets a variable the CLI already respects. Profile names autocomplete with Tab, and ccp update pulls the latest version when there is one.

What I'd love feedback on

• macOS Keychain. On macOS, Claude Code keeps its OAuth credentials in the system Keychain rather than in the config dir. Depending on your Claude Code version, that Keychain entry may be shared between profiles. I've built and tested this mainly on Windows and Linux, so if you're on a Mac and ccp list shows the right account on each profile (or doesn't), I'd really like to hear about it in an issue.
• Which folders should be shared? I went with the ones that make --resume behave. settings.json and MCP configs stay per profile on purpose. Would you share anything else?

The repo is here: github.com/petersonsenadevs/claude-code-switch, MIT licensed. If it saves you the forty seconds, a star helps other people find it.