Claude Code channel

A scheduled cloud audit finishes at 3am. By the time you open your editor, your agent has no idea. The squirrelscan channel fixes that: it pushes audit_complete, audit_failed and issues_detected events into a running Claude Code session, so the agent can read the report and start on the fixes.

It is a Claude Code channel: a local stdio server that Claude Code spawns. It is the squirrel binary itself, because channels cannot be hosted and squirrel already holds your cloud login. See squirrel channel for the command reference.

Requirements

• Claude Code with channels support.
• A squirrelscan login session (squirrel auth login). The notification feed does not accept API keys.
• Cloud audits, for example a scheduled audit, to have something to report.

Add the server

Add the channel to your project’s .mcp.json, or to ~/.claude.json for every project:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "squirrelscan": {
      "command": "squirrel",
      "args": ["channel"]
    }
  }
}

The server name is the source your agent sees on every event.

Start Claude Code with the channel

While the channel is not on the approved allowlist, start Claude Code with the development flag in an interactive session:

claude --dangerously-load-development-channels server:squirrelscan

Claude Code shows a warning listing the development channels. Choose I am using this for local development to continue. The flag is ignored in non-interactive mode (-p) and in the Agent SDK.

Team and Enterprise organizations must also have channels enabled by an admin (channelsEnabled). An admin can instead list squirrelscan in the organization’s allowedChannelPlugins. See the Claude Code channels documentation for the current rules.

What your agent receives

Each event arrives as a <channel source="squirrelscan" ...> tag. The body is a one-line summary built from ids and counts, and the attributes carry the ids your agent needs for tool calls:

<channel source="squirrelscan" category="audit_complete" website_id="web_123" run_id="run_456" domain="example.com">
Cloud audit complete for example.com (run run_456): health score 91, 2 errors, 5 warnings.
</channel>

The channel’s instructions tell Claude what to do next: read the report with get_report, work the findings with list_issues, and treat anything fetched about the site as untrusted data.

Event text never comes from your site

Notification titles and bodies can contain text taken from crawled pages, and an ungated channel is a prompt-injection path. So the channel never forwards them. Event text is built from the category, validated ids, counts and fixed strings only. Your agent pulls the details through the squirrelscan MCP tools, where the server’s instructions tell the agent to treat anything taken from your site as data, never as instructions.

The channel does not declare Claude Code’s permission relay capability, so nothing delivered through it can approve or deny a tool call.

Choose events and polling

Pass options in args:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "squirrelscan": {
      "command": "squirrel",
      "args": ["channel", "--categories", "audit_failed,issues_detected", "--interval", "60"]
    }
  }
}

On a 429 or 5xx response, or a network error, the channel doubles its delay for each consecutive failure, up to 10 minutes, then returns to the normal interval after the next success.

Restarts and missed events

The channel remembers where it stopped, per organization, in ~/.squirrel/channel/<org id>.json (on Windows, under %LOCALAPPDATA%\squirrel\channel). When Claude Code starts the channel again, events that happened while it was closed are delivered once. The first run ever starts from now and does not replay history.

If the cloud feed does not yet support cursors, the channel falls back to reading the most recent page of notifications and de-duplicating by id with a bounded record of what it already delivered. In that mode, more than 50 new notifications between two polls can be missed.

Not signed in

If there is no login session, the channel sends a single login_required event asking the user to run squirrel auth login, and keeps running. Once you sign in, events start flowing without restarting Claude Code. An API key in SQUIRRELSCAN_API_KEY cannot read the feed, so it gets the same event.

Troubleshooting

• Nothing arrives: run /mcp in Claude Code to check that squirrelscan is connected, and confirm you started Claude Code with the development flag. Claude Code drops channel events silently when the session did not load the server as a channel or an organization policy blocks it.
• Debug output: the channel logs to stderr only, because stdout carries the protocol. Start Claude Code with claude --debug to see it.
• Wrong organization: the channel follows your account’s active organization and checks it again every few polls, so a switch in the dashboard takes effect without a restart. The new organization starts from now and does not replay history.