Wire Claude Code into your menu bar

Lounge Pro ships with a local HTTP listener on 127.0.0.1:8866. In about five minutes you'll have Claude Code firing rich notifications into your menu bar every time it finishes a task or needs your attention.

One-click setup

Skip the manual steps

Copy a ready-made prompt and paste it into any AI coding agent — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, or Aider. It detects your CLI and wires Lounge up for you.

What you'll see

lounge_project · Stop
Claude finished
Task complete in lounge_project
claude-code · just now

Step 1 — Enable the Monitor in Lounge

  1. Right-click the Lounge icon in the menu bar and pick Settings.
  2. Open the Monitor tab.
  3. Toggle HTTP listener on. Optionally enable the unread badge and auto-open.

The Monitor tab and the listener itself only become active with a valid Lounge Pro license. The toggle is a no-op until you activate one in Settings → License.

Step 2 — Smoke-test the listener

Before touching your AI agent, confirm the listener accepts a request. Run this in any terminal — you should see a new row appear in the LoungePanel.

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8866/notify \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"title":"Hello from curl","body":"Lounge is listening","source":"smoke-test","level":"info","project":"setup","event":"smoke-test","status":"complete"}'

Step 3 — The Stop hook

Fires every time Claude finishes a turn — the canonical "Task complete" notification. The hook reads the event JSON from stdin, uses jq to extract the project name from cwd, and forwards it as the project field so the panel chip shows which project just finished.

Append to ~/.claude/settings.json (merge with your existing hooks block if you have one):

{
  "hooks": {
    "Stop": [\
      {\
        "matcher": "",\
        "hooks": [\
          {\
            "type": "command",\
            "command": "jq -c '{title:\"Claude finished\",body:(\"Task complete in \" + (.cwd | split(\"/\") | last)),source:\"claude-code\",level:\"info\",project:(.cwd | split(\"/\") | last),event:.hook_event_name,status:\"complete\"}' | curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8866/notify -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d @- >/dev/null"\
          }\
        ]\
      }\
    ]
  }
}

Step 4 — The Notification hook

Fires when Claude is waiting on a permission decision or input — the "come back, I need you" signal. The event payload includes a message field that we forward as the body, and we tag the row as status: blocked so it gets a yellow accent dot.

{
  "hooks": {
    "Notification": [\
      {\
        "matcher": "",\
        "hooks": [\
          {\
            "type": "command",\
            "command": "jq -c '{title:\"Claude needs you\",body:(.message // \"Awaiting input\"),source:\"claude-code\",level:\"warn\",project:(.cwd | split(\"/\") | last),event:.hook_event_name,status:\"blocked\"}' | curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8866/notify -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d @- >/dev/null"\
          }\
        ]\
      }\
    ]
  }
}

Step 5 — Optional shell helper

If you want to fire notifications from arbitrary shell scripts (CI runners, build steps, custom slash commands), drop this into ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc. It auto-fills the project name from $PWD.

notify-claude() {
  local title="${1:-Claude}"
  local body="${2:-}"
  local status="${3:-complete}"     # complete | failed | blocked
  local level="${4:-info}"          # info | warn | error

jq -nc \
    --arg title "$title" --arg body "$body" \
    --arg level "$level" --arg status "$status" \
    --arg project "$(basename "$PWD")" \
    '{title:$title, body:$body, source:"claude-code",
      level:$level, project:$project, status:$status}' \
    | curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8866/notify \
        -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d @- >/dev/null
}

Usage: notify-claude "Build done" "passed in 2.3s" complete

Troubleshooting

Nothing shows up in Lounge

Confirm Settings → Monitor is enabled and your license is active. The listener silently refuses to start without a valid license, even if the toggle is on.

Port 8866 already in use

Another process is bound to 8866. Find it with lsof -iTCP:8866 -sTCP:LISTEN and stop it. The port is fixed in the current build.

Connection refused from the CLI

The listener only binds to 127.0.0.1. If your agent runs in a container or VM, forward the port or use host.docker.internal:8866 instead of localhost.

Hook fires but no notification

Run claude --debug and watch hook stderr. The most common cause is a JSON-escaping error in the inline command. Use jq -c to build the payload instead of hand-quoting it.

Notifications appear but the chip is empty

Your hook is sending the legacy schema. Make sure project, event, and status are at the top level of the JSON body — not nested under metadata.