Where Cline stores rules, workflows, memory bank, and MCP servers

Cline (the open-source VS Code coding agent) splits its context three ways: version-controlled files in your project, a global folder under your Documents directory, and one JSON file buried deep in VS Code’s own storage that almost nobody finds by browsing. ~ is your home directory; paths starting with .clinerules are relative to a project root.

At a glance

Artifact	Global	Per-project	Format
Rules	~/Documents/Cline/Rules/*.md	.clinerules/ folder (*.md, *.txt) or a single .clinerules file	Markdown / plain text
Cross-tool rules	~/.agents/AGENTS.md	AGENTS.md (project root)	Markdown
Workflows	~/Documents/Cline/Workflows/*.md	.clinerules/workflows/*.md	Markdown
MCP servers	cline_mcp_settings.json (inside VS Code globalStorage — see below)	—	JSON
Memory bank	—	memory-bank/*.md (convention, driven by a rules file)	Markdown
Ignore file	—	.clineignore (project root)	gitignore syntax

Rules: .clinerules and the Documents folder

Workspace rules live in a .clinerules/ folder at the project root — Cline combines every .md and .txt file inside it into one rule set, which is what you commit and share with the team. The older convention of a single .clinerules file at the root predates the folder and is still what you’ll find in many repos.

Global rules don’t live in a dotfolder at all: they’re Markdown files in ~/Documents/Cline/Rules/ (Documents\Cline\Rules on Windows). Every rule — global or workspace — has an on/off toggle in the Cline panel (the scale icon), and workspace rules win when they conflict with global ones.

Your global rules are in Documents, not a dotfolder

Backup scripts and scanners tuned for ~/.something directories walk right past ~/Documents/Cline/. If your Documents folder syncs to OneDrive or iCloud, your Cline rules silently sync across machines — convenient until two machines disagree about what a rule says.

AGENTS.md

Cline reads the cross-tool AGENTS.md convention: the project-root AGENTS.md plus a global ~/.agents/AGENTS.md. It’s the same file Codex, Cursor, and Claude Code understand — one rules file the whole toolchain shares.

Workflows

Workflows are step-by-step Markdown playbooks you invoke as slash commands (/deploy.md). Project workflows live in .clinerules/workflows/, global ones in ~/Documents/Cline/Workflows/, and a project workflow shadows a global one with the same name. Note the layering: workflows sit inside the .clinerules folder but are not rules — rules load into every task, workflows only run when you call them.

MCP servers — the gotcha

cline_mcp_settings.json hides in VS Code’s globalStorage

Cline’s MCP servers are not in your project or your home dotfolders. The config is cline_mcp_settings.json inside the extension’s globalStorage:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\Code\User\globalStorage\saoudrizwan.claude-dev\settings\cline_mcp_settings.json
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/globalStorage/saoudrizwan.claude-dev/settings/cline_mcp_settings.json
• Linux: ~/.config/Code/User/globalStorage/saoudrizwan.claude-dev/settings/cline_mcp_settings.json

On VS Code Insiders swap Code for Code - Insiders; on VSCodium, VSCodium. The extension ID is saoudrizwan.claude-dev — Cline’s original name — which is why searching your disk for “cline” won’t find it.

The file itself is the familiar mcpServers map (command/args/env, or a URL for remote servers), same shape as Claude Desktop’s — and the env block is where API keys end up, so treat it as secret-adjacent.

Memory bank

Cline’s famous memory bank is a convention, not built-in storage: a rules file instructs Cline to maintain a memory-bank/ folder in your project with structured Markdown — projectbrief.md, productContext.md, activeContext.md, systemPatterns.md, techContext.md, progress.md — and to re-read all of it at the start of every task. Because it’s plain Markdown in the repo, it’s greppable, diffable, and portable to any other tool.

.clineignore

A .clineignore file at the project root (gitignore syntax) excludes files from Cline’s context — worth setting up early, since trimming what the agent reads is the cheapest performance and cost win available.

Seeing all of it at once

Quartermaster’s scanner indexes every location on this page — both .clinerules shapes, workflows, and the servers parsed out of cline_mcp_settings.json wherever globalStorage puts it — into one searchable registry alongside Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and 8 more tools. It can convert a .clinerules file to CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md (and back), and secrets are never indexed — env/header key names kept, values dropped. See the full discovery map or the quickstart.