zsnoop-mcp

Ask your AI assistant things like:

• ⏪ "Recover my .zshrc from before I committed the rewrite three weeks ago."
• 🧹 "Which snapshots older than 6 months are wasting the most space?"
• 🔎 "When did the directory /srv/backups first appear on this host?"
• ⌛ "Find everything deleted under /home/youruser in the last week, and show me when each thing was last present."
• 🏥 "Are any of my pools throwing disk errors? When was the last scrub?"

An MCP server for read-only exploration of ZFS snapshots on remote hosts.

Browse, diff, search, and read files from any snapshot on any of your ZFS hosts through your AI assistant, over a single persistent SSH connection per host. No mutation operations are ever exposed.

Quickstart

# 1. Install
uv tool install zsnoop-mcp        # or: pipx install zsnoop-mcp

# 2. Configure one host (more in docs/INSTALL.md)
mkdir -p ~/.config/zsnoop-mcp
cat > ~/.config/zsnoop-mcp/hosts.toml <<'EOF'
[hosts.myhost]
ssh_target = "myhost.example.com"
agent_mode = "bootstrap"
sudo       = false
EOF

# 3. Register the MCP server with Claude Code
claude mcp add zsnoop --scope user -- zsnoop-mcp

# 4. Restart Claude Code, then ask your assistant any of the prompts above.

The agent is streamed over SSH on first connect — nothing needs to be installed on the remote host beyond python3 (3.11+) and the zfs CLI. Read-only is enforced by an explicit allowlist on the agent side; the LLM can't bypass it.

About this codebase

This project was developed collaboratively with Claude Code (Anthropic). The human author (Mark Hellewell) defined the architecture, security model, and acceptance criteria, and reviewed every change before it landed; Claude handled the bulk of the drafting, test scaffolding, refactors, and documentation. Read-only-by-construction was a hard requirement from day one, enforced by an explicit method allowlist and the test suite — see SECURITY.md. If you're reviewing or auditing the code, treat that as context, not as a reason to skip the usual scrutiny.

How it works

┌─────────────────┐   MCP (stdio)    ┌────────────────────┐
│   MCP client    │ ───────────────► │  zsnoop-mcp server │
│ (Claude Code,…) │ ◄─────────────── │     (local)        │
└─────────────────┘                  └──────────┬─────────┘
                                                │
                       JSON-RPC over SSH stdio  │  one persistent
                       (one channel per host)   │  subprocess
                                                ▼
                                      ┌─────────────────────┐
                                      │  zfs-snoop-agent    │
                                      │  (remote, Python)   │
                                      └─────────┬───────────┘
                                                │
                                       zfs list / zfs diff,
                                       walk .zfs/snapshot/…
                                                ▼
                                            ZFS pool

The remote agent is a single-file, stdlib-only Python script. It can be pre-installed at ~/bin/zfs-snoop-agent on each host, or streamed over SSH stdin on each connection — no permanent install required.

Tools exposed to the LLM

Designed around three dominant workflows: file recovery ("get me /etc/foo as it was yesterday"), config drift audit ("when did X change?"), and forensics ("what was on the box when Y broke?").

Tool	What it does
list_hosts	Configured hosts
agent_info	Agent version, methods, limits
list_pools	ZFS pools visible to the agent (live discovery)
pool_status	Parsed zpool status: vdev tree, scrub, errors
list_datasets	Filesystems and volumes
dataset_properties	zfs get (all or filtered) with values + sources
list_snapshots	Snapshots (optionally scoped to a dataset, recursive)
snapshot_cadence	Snapshot inventory summary: counts by class, biggest gap
diff_snapshots	Path-level diff between two snapshots
list_dir	Bounded directory listing within a snapshot
size_breakdown	Recursive bytes for a snapshot dir + per-child sizes
top_consumers	Top-N largest files/dirs under a snapshot subtree
read_file	Bounded read; UTF-8 or base64 for binary
find_files	fnmatch name search inside a snapshot
content_grep	Regex content search inside a snapshot
file_history	Every snapshot's version of a given file in a dataset
versions_of	file_history deduped by content hash (distinct versions only)
file_diff	Unified diff of one file across two snapshots
snapshots_containing	Snapshots in which a path currently exists (time-ranged)
first_appearance	Earliest snapshot containing a path
last_appearance	Latest snapshot containing a path (answers "when did X disappear?")
find_deleted	Paths deleted between two snapshots in a time window
bisect_change	Binary-search snapshots for the one where a predicate flips
stale_snapshots	Snapshots older than a time phrase, sorted by unique bytes
size_delta	Bytes written between two snapshots of one dataset

Time-range parameters accept ISO 8601 or human phrases — yesterday, last week, 3 days ago, 2 hours ago, etc. Parsing happens locally; the agent only sees absolute ISO 8601 timestamps.

Install

From PyPI (recommended)

uv tool install zsnoop-mcp    # or: pipx install zsnoop-mcp / pip install zsnoop-mcp

Run it with zsnoop-mcp.

From a clone (for hacking on the code)

git clone https://github.com/hamsolodev/zsnoop-mcp.git
cd zsnoop-mcp
uv sync

Run it with uv run zsnoop-mcp from the checkout.

See docs/PUBLISHING.md for the per-release flow (version bump → tag → CI publishes via OIDC).

Configure

Create ~/.config/zsnoop-mcp/hosts.toml:

[hosts.r2d2]
ssh_target = "r2d2.example.com"
agent_mode = "bootstrap"          # or "preinstalled"
sudo       = false                # set true to read root-owned snapshot files
pools      = ["rpool", "bpool"]   # used by the LLM for scoping hints

[hosts.c3po]
ssh_target = "c3po.example.com"
agent_mode = "bootstrap"
sudo       = false
pools      = ["rpool"]

[hosts.this-box]
transport  = "local"              # run the agent on this machine, no SSH
agent_mode = "bootstrap"

Per-host setup on the remote (one-time):

# user mode: grant diff for each pool you want to compare snapshots in
sudo zfs allow -u $USER diff rpool

See docs/INSTALL.md for the full setup, including sudo mode for reading root-owned snapshot files.

Wire into Claude Code

After uv tool install zsnoop-mcp:

claude mcp add zsnoop --scope user -- zsnoop-mcp

That writes the entry directly to your Claude Code config; no JSON editing needed. Restart your Claude Code session; the tools appear under the zsnoop namespace.

If you're running from a worktree instead of an installed binary, point the command at uv run --directory <path> instead:

claude mcp add zsnoop --scope user -- \
    uv run --directory ~/path/to/zsnoop-mcp zsnoop-mcp

Or, if you'd rather edit ~/.claude/settings.json by hand:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "zsnoop": { "command": "zsnoop-mcp" }
  }
}

Use

See docs/USAGE.md for example prompts that exercise the file-recovery, drift-audit, and forensics workflows.

Documentation

• New here? Start with the onboarding tutorial — a 10-chapter, what/why/how walk through the codebase, ending with a worked example of adding a new tool end-to-end. Renders nicely as HTML via uv run mkdocs serve (see --group docs).
• Installation — local setup, ZFS delegation, sudo mode
• Usage examples — concrete prompts the tools handle
• Security model — threat model, guarantees, sudo tradeoff
• Publishing — releasing to PyPI

Development

uv sync                            # install runtime + dev deps into .venv
uv run pytest                      # tests
uv run ruff check                  # lint
uv run ruff format                 # format
uv run mypy                        # type-check
uv run pip-audit --skip-editable   # CVE scan of locked deps
uv run pre-commit install          # set up hooks

Pre-commit runs pip-audit automatically whenever pyproject.toml or uv.lock change.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.