git-pulse

git-pulse

Read-only git remote pulse-check that fires on Claude Code session start.

When you open a project in Claude Code (CLI or the Anthropic app), this plugin quietly inspects the configured remote, compares it to the SHA it last saw on this machine, and injects a short summary into Claude's context — so the very first thing Claude knows about your repo is what changed, who pushed it, and where you are relative to the default branch.

It never fetches and never modifies your working tree. If sync is needed, the hook tells you (and Claude) to run git fetch. The decision stays yours.

It is multi-account aware: if you have several GitHub identities registered with gh, it will fall through them when the default credential helper can't reach a private repo.

Install

# In any Claude Code session:
/plugin marketplace add we-app/git-pulse
/plugin install git-pulse@git-pulse

That's it. Next time you start a session in a git repo, you'll see something like:

[git-pulse] acme/widgets  branch=main  via=gh:work-account
• Remote moved since last session here: a1b2c3d4e5 → f6g7h8i9j0  (last seen 2026-05-04T14:22:11+00:00)
  New commits (3 shown):
    - f6g7h8i9j0  alice: Fix login race when token expires mid-request
    - 9d8c7b6a5f  bob:   Bump axios to 1.7.4
    - 4e5d6c7b8a  alice: Add retry to flaky billing test
• 2 unpushed local commit(s) on main (vs cached origin/main).
• PR #421 OPEN  mergeable=MERGEABLE  CI: 6✓ 0✗ 1…  https://github.com/acme/widgets/pull/421
→ Run `git fetch` (or ask Claude to) to sync local refs. No fetch was performed.

On a clean repo, you'll just see:

[git-pulse] acme/widgets  branch=main
• Up to date with remote (a1b2c3d4e5).

What it checks

Check	What it shows
Remote freshness	Has the remote tip moved since you last opened this repo here? If yes, lists new commits with author + first line of message (via gh api .../compare).
Unpushed local commits	How many local commits aren't on the remote yet (based on cached upstream ref).
Branch vs default	Ahead/behind count of your branch vs origin/HEAD (or main/master fallback). Marked as based on local refs since last fetch.
PR + CI status	If gh is available and there's an open PR for the branch, shows PR number, state, mergeability, and CI rollup.

All checks are individually toggleable in the config file.

Config

git-pulse reads ~/.config/git-pulse/config.json (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git-pulse/config.json). A starter is shipped at config.json.example:

{
  "checks": {
    "remote_freshness": true,
    "pr_ci_status": true
  },
  "max_commits_shown": 5,
  "default_branch_fallback": ["main", "master", "trunk", "develop"],
  "gh_accounts_priority": []
}

• checks.* — toggle each check on/off.
• max_commits_shown — cap on how many new-commit lines to inject into context.
• default_branch_fallback — which branches to try as the default when origin/HEAD isn't set.
• gh_accounts_priority — preferred order for the gh multi-account fallback (e.g. ["work-account", "personal"]).

How it works

Step	What it does
1	SessionStart hook fires (startup or resume matcher).
2	Script reads cwd from the hook's stdin JSON.
3	Bails silently if cwd isn't a git repo or has no remote.
4	Picks origin (or first remote), parses host/owner/repo.
5	Tries git ls-remote first (uses your normal credential helper).
6	If that fails on GitHub, iterates gh auth status accounts.
7	If the SHA changed, calls gh api /compare for author + message.
8	Computes unpushed count + branch-vs-default from cached refs.
9	Looks up open PR + CI rollup via gh pr view --json.
10	Writes one paragraph to stdout as additionalContext.
11	Updates the state file.

Hard rules baked into the script

• Never crashes. Top-level try/except swallows anything; SessionStart failures must not block your session.
• Never fetches. Only ls-remote and authenticated gh api reads. Any drift you see is reported, never reconciled, without your say-so.
• Time-bounded. Every git/network call has a timeout; the whole hook is capped at 30s by hooks.json.
• No secrets in state. Stored state is just {remote_sha, branch, last_checked_at, account_used} per repo, keyed by SHA-256 of the remote URL.

State location

$CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA/repos/<hash>.json

The plugin manager guarantees that directory survives plugin updates.

Debugging locally

You can run the hook by hand:

echo '{"cwd": "/path/to/your/repo"}' | python3 scripts/git-pulse.py | jq .

The output is a single JSON object containing hookSpecificOutput.additionalContext.

License

MIT — do whatever, no warranty.