Exporting and Syncing Claude Code Superpowers Across Workstations

Table of Contents

1. The Custom Agent Problem
2. Where Claude Code Stores State
3. Separating Configuration from Secret Tokens
4. Building the Export and Packaging Script
5. Automating Machine Bootstrapping
6. Conclusion
7. References

The Custom Agent Problem

If you use Claude Code for serious daily engineering, your setup quickly becomes highly customized:

• Custom skills (brainstorming, writing-plans, subagent-driven-development, systematic-debugging).
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) server registrations.
• Global developer instructions and project context configurations.
• Custom shell aliases, memory notes, and workflow plugins.

Then you sit down at a secondary laptop, a remote dev box, or help a colleague set up their environment—and your workflow vanishes. Setting everything up by hand takes an hour of tedious folder copying, config editing, and hunting down missing plugins.

We built a clean, automated export and synchronization workflow that packages your entire Claude Code agent environment into a portable, reproducible bundle.

Where Claude Code Stores State

On Linux and macOS, Claude Code organizes its configuration under ~/.claude/ and ~/.config/:

~/.claude/
├── config.json              # Global flags and model preferences
├── plugins/                 # Installed plugins & official superpower skills
│   └── cache/
└── projects/                # Session transcripts & conversation history

~/.config/superpowers/
├── skills/                  # Custom author skills (SKILL.md)
└── hooks/                   # Execution hooks

Crucially, some files contain sensitive session credentials and OAuth tokens (like CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN and API keys), while others contain purely functional workflow code. You cannot simply tar the entire directory without accidentally publishing your private account tokens!

Separating Configuration from Secret Tokens

To make synchronization safe, we isolate functional artifacts into an export manifest:

# scripts/export_claude_env.py snippet
import shutil, os, tarfile
from pathlib import Path

SAFE_PATHS = [
    Path.home() / ".config/superpowers/skills",
    Path.home() / ".claude/plugins",
]

SENSITIVE_FILES = [
    ".oauth_token",
    "credentials.json",
    "auth.token",
]

The export script recursively copies all skills, plugins, and custom prompt templates into a clean staging tree while explicitly excluding any file matching credential patterns.

Building the Export and Packaging Script

Here is the complete synchronization script we use to bundle our environment:

#!/bin/bash
# bin/export-superpowers.sh
set -euo pipefail

EXPORT_DIR="/tmp/claude-superpowers-export"
ARCHIVE_PATH="$HOME/claude-superpowers-$(date +%F).tar.gz"

rm -rf "$EXPORT_DIR"
mkdir -p "$EXPORT_DIR/skills" "$EXPORT_DIR/plugins"

echo "[+] Copying custom skills..."
if [ -d "$HOME/.config/superpowers/skills" ]; then
    rsync -av --exclude="*.log" "$HOME/.config/superpowers/skills/" "$EXPORT_DIR/skills/"
fi

echo "[+] Copying installed plugins (excluding credentials)..."
if [ -d "$HOME/.claude/plugins" ]; then
    rsync -av --exclude="*token*" --exclude="*secret*" "$HOME/.claude/plugins/" "$EXPORT_DIR/plugins/"
fi

echo "[+] Packaging archive: $ARCHIVE_PATH"
tar -czf "$ARCHIVE_PATH" -C "$EXPORT_DIR" .
rm -rf "$EXPORT_DIR"

echo "[✓] Export complete! Ready to transfer."

Automating Machine Bootstrapping

On a fresh machine, the restoration script installs Claude Code CLI, creates standard directories, and unpacks the bundle:

#!/bin/bash
# bin/import-superpowers.sh
set -euo pipefail

ARCHIVE="${1:-claude-superpowers-latest.tar.gz}"

mkdir -p "$HOME/.config/superpowers/skills" "$HOME/.claude/plugins"
tar -xzf "$ARCHIVE" -C "/tmp/claude-import"

rsync -av "/tmp/claude-import/skills/" "$HOME/.config/superpowers/skills/"
rsync -av "/tmp/claude-import/plugins/" "$HOME/.claude/plugins/"

rm -rf "/tmp/claude-import"
echo "[✓] Environment restored. Run 'claude' to start coding!"

Conclusion

By standardizing your agent skills and configurations into a portable repository, your AI pair programming workflows become instantly portable across any development machine in seconds.

References

• Anthropic Claude Code CLI Documentation
• Antigravity Customization Architecture