Restore tmux session after reboot

Question

Is there any way to save a tmux session? In other words, if I reboot the computer, will I always lose the sessions?

Answer 1

Yes, if you reboot you computer you will lose the sessions. Sessions cannot be saved. But, they can be scripted. What most do in fact is to script some sessions so that you can re-create them. For instance, here's a trivial shell script to create a session:

#!/bin/zsh                                                                                                   

SESSIONNAME="script"
tmux has-session -t $SESSIONNAME &> /dev/null

if [ $? != 0 ] 
 then
    tmux new-session -s $SESSIONNAME -n script -d
    tmux send-keys -t $SESSIONNAME "~/bin/script" C-m 
fi

tmux attach -t $SESSIONNAME

Here's what it does. First, it checks if there's any session already with that name (in this case, the very original name is "script") with tmux has-session. It checks the return code. If there's a ongoing session with that name already, it skips the "if" cycle and go straight to the last line, where it attaches to the session. Otherwise, it creates a session and sends some keys to it (just running a random script for now). Then it exits the "if" block and attaches.

This is a very trivial sample. You can create multiple windows, panes, and the like before you attach.

This will not be the very same thing you asked for, though. If you do any changes to the session, for instance you rename a window and create a new pane in it, if you reboot those changes won't of course be saved.

There are some tools that ease the process of scripting sessions, although I prefer to do things manually (I think it is more versatile). Those tools are Tmuxinator and Teamocil.

My main source of informations was "The Pragmatic Bookshelf" Tmux book.

Answer 2

I wrote a simple bash script that persists open tmux sessions, windows and current working directories in each.

Call it like so manually or periodically from cron (because you might forget):

tmux-session save

It will write to ~/.tmux-session. Restore them after reboot like so:

tmux-session restore

I find this much better than a several hundred line long Perl script.

Answer 3

I wrote a tmux plugin that enables you to save complete tmux environment and restore it later. It strives to be really detailed so that you have a feeling you never quit tmux.

https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect

Update: now there's a tmux-continuum plugin that performs automatic background saves of tmux environment. Optionally it also *automatically* restores tmux env after computer reboot.

Answer 4

tmuxinator is a tool written in Ruby, that could be used to create and manage tmux sessions with ease. It could be used to create a project, which could later be instantiated as as tmux session.

Answer 5

Consider this partial solution found here

The author creates a function that saves the history of the tmux session in order to persist the state of the tmux session post a server reboot.

Answer 6

I successfully use https://github.com/jimeh/tmuxifier for recreating sessions. This can be installed without ruby, just using git.

Samples are pretty self explanatory, e.g.: https://github.com/jimeh/tmuxifier/blob/master/examples/example.session.sh