Set up peek with Claude Code in 2 minutes

What you’ll end up with

A working peek MCP server registered with Claude Code, verified by asking Claude to call list_recent_sessions and seeing it respond.

Claude Code listing peek sessions after install

Prerequisites

A recent install of Claude Code (CLI or VS Code extension)
Node >= 22 (peek’s native better-sqlite3 dependency only ships prebuilt binaries for Node 22+; older Node falls back to compiling from source and fails on stock Windows)
Chrome with the peek extension installed — from the Chrome Web Store, or loaded unpacked from packages/peek-extension/chrome-mv3/ for local builds

Steps

0. One-click — install as a Claude Code plugin (fastest)

If you’d rather not touch the CLI first, install peek as a Claude Code plugin:

/plugin marketplace add Cubenest/rrweb-stack
/plugin install peekdev@peek

This wires up the MCP server (18 tools) and the peek skill in one step. You still need the recorder — the native host and the Chrome extension — so after installing the plugin, run peek init once (Step 2) and install the extension (Prerequisites), then skip to Verify. Local-first: peek uploads nothing — what your MCP client does with the data is up to you.

1. Install the CLI

npm i -g @peekdev/cli

The package name is @peekdev/cli; the binary it installs is peek.

2. Run `peek init`

peek init

The wizard detects Claude Code’s ~/.claude.json and offers to write the MCP server entry. Accept it. The block it adds is:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "peek": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@peekdev/mcp@latest"]
    }
  }
}

If Claude Code was running, restart it so it picks up the new server.

3. Verify

In Claude Code:

Call peek’s list_recent_sessions tool and show me what you get.

You should see either an empty list (no sessions captured yet) or your most recent capture sessions.

Why this works

peek init reads the existing ~/.claude.json, merges in the mcpServers.peek entry without touching any other servers, and writes the file back. Claude Code starts the server on demand via npx -y @peekdev/mcp@latest, so there’s no daemon to manage. (The @latest tag is required while peek is in alpha — a bare @peekdev/mcp resolves an implicit * range that doesn’t match prerelease versions and fails with ETARGET.)