What is recensa?

Recensa is a self-hosted web viewer for reading, searching, and reviewing the conversation transcripts that Claude Code, the AI coding assistant, saves to your computer every time you use it. Normally those transcripts sit as raw, hard to read files on disk, Recensa indexes them into a local database and displays them in a browser at a local web address, without uploading anything to an outside server. Once running, Recensa gives you full text search across every session you have ever run, not just the handful shown by Claude Code's own resume picker, so you can find something like "how did I fix that bug last month" in one search. Long sessions with thousands of tool calls can be folded down into a simplified view that hides tool activity and internal thinking, leaving just your prompts and the model's replies, and a focus mode strips away the surrounding interface for distraction free reading. Every file edit an agent made during a session is rendered as a proper before and after diff, so you can review exactly what changed without leaving the viewer. Each session also shows statistics such as which tools were used, how many files were created, edited, or deleted, which AI models were involved, and an estimated dollar cost for that session. When a session spawns multiple subagents working together, Recensa rebuilds the full roster of agents involved and lets you jump directly into any subagent's own transcript and back again. Recensa runs as a Docker container, reading your local .claude folder and serving the viewer at localhost:7788. It can be started directly from a prebuilt Docker Hub image, through Docker Compose, or built from source after cloning the repository. The first time it runs, it builds its search index in the background, which can take anywhere from minutes to tens of minutes depending on how many past sessions you have, while the interface stays usable in the meantime. The project is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT License.