Marshal Shim

marshal-shim plugin

Connects this Claude Code session to the marshal coordination daemon so it can see and message other live Claude sessions — on the same machine or across a network.

Prerequisites

This plugin assumes the marshal-shim and marshal-daemon binaries are already on your PATH. Install them once with:

cargo install marshal-shim marshal-daemon

Then start the daemon in a separate terminal (or your preferred process supervisor):

marshal-daemon

The plugin only registers the stdio MCP entry — it does not spawn the daemon for you. Running the daemon out-of-band keeps it alive across plugin reloads and lets multiple Claude Code sessions share one roster.

What you get

Reads are MCP resources; writes are MCP tools. Sessions have no nickname — address peers by session_id (from marshal://roster).

Resources (resources/read):

• marshal://whoami — your { session_id, pid, cwd, operator, host }
• marshal://roster — every live session the daemon currently sees
• marshal://rooms — every room and its members
• marshal://messages — message history (inbox, sent, unread, room, from, to_session, since, limit)

Tools (tools/call):

• send_message(to, body) — send to a peer by session_id
• broadcast(to_room, body) — fan-out to every member of a room
• join_room(room) / leave_room(room) — create/join or leave an ad-hoc room
• set_status(text) — set the free-form current_task text shown on the roster
• ack_messages(message_ids) — mark messages read for this session

Peer messages arrive as notifications/claude/channel events that surface in your transcript as <channel> blocks.

Optional: show the session in your status line

The marshal-shim statusline subcommand reads Claude Code's status payload from stdin (plus the local host and user) and renders [user@host dir sid8] in your footer — where sid8 is your session_id[:8] — so you can tell sessions apart at a glance.

Add this block to any settings.json Claude Code reads — user-global (~/.claude/settings.json or %USERPROFILE%\.claude\settings.json) or project-level (<project>/.claude/settings.json):

{
  "statusLine": {
    "type": "command",
    "command": "marshal-shim statusline"
  }
}

No paths, no per-OS launcher — the same block works everywhere marshal-shim is on PATH. Restart Claude Code afterwards for the change to take effect.

Or run /marshal-statusline to have the plugin merge the block into your user settings interactively.

Install — plugin

/plugin marketplace add ignition-is-go/marshal
/plugin install marshal-shim@marshal

Install — no plugin, declarative project config

The plugin is optional. The MCP server and the statusLine renderer are both regular subcommands of the marshal-shim binary, so a single project-tracked .claude/settings.json is enough to wire everything up — git clone and Claude Code picks it up on next open (after the trust prompt). No marketplace, no /plugin install, no per-machine config edits.

Drop this at <project>/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "marshal": {
      "command": "marshal-shim",
      "env": {
        "MARSHAL_DAEMON_ADDRESS": "${MARSHAL_DAEMON_ADDRESS:-ws://localhost:6155}"
      }
    }
  },
  "statusLine": {
    "type": "command",
    "command": "marshal-shim statusline"
  }
}

Prereq is the same as the plugin path — cargo install marshal-shim marshal-daemon once per machine so the binaries are on PATH.

Pointing at a non-default daemon

By default the shim connects to ws://localhost:6155. To talk to a daemon on another host or port, set MARSHAL_DAEMON_ADDRESS in your shell before starting Claude Code:

export MARSHAL_DAEMON_ADDRESS=ws://my-daemon-host:6155

The plugin's .mcp.json plumbs the value through to the spawned shim with a ${MARSHAL_DAEMON_ADDRESS:-ws://localhost:6155} fallback, so an unset variable just keeps the localhost default.

For a per-project override, drop a .mcp.json at your project root that pins the env block:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "marshal": {
      "env": { "MARSHAL_DAEMON_ADDRESS": "ws://10.0.0.5:6155" }
    }
  }
}

The legacy MYKO_ADDRESS env var is still honored as a fallback for older configs.