Restoring tmux Sessions | Andrew Johnson

I’ve been a big fan of tmux since I started using it in 2014. I use it locally for multiplexing my terminal, and in combination with mosh it’s also fantastic for work on remote servers. My main issue with it is losing my sessions when a box restarts. Luckily there’s plugins for tmux that solve this problem!

Prerequisites

tmux (brew install tmux on OS X)
TPM (tmux plugin manager). See https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm#installation for installation instructions.

Setup

There are two plugins I recommend: tmux-resurrect and tmux-continuum. tmux-resurrect enables saving and restoring tmux sessions manually, while tmux-continuum saves automatically and allows for automatically restoring from the last save when tmux is started. To enable these settings, add the following to your ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum'

set -g @continuum-restore 'on'

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum'

set -g @continuum-restore 'on'

Usage

With this configuration, there’s no need to do anything manually. Your tmux sessions will be automatically saved every 15 minutes and automatically restored when tmux is started (e.g. after a reboot). You can manually save with prefix-Ctrl-s and manually restore with prefix-Ctrl-r if desired.

Note that this won’t restore running applications. tmux-resurrect has an optional configuration for doing so, but I’ve left this off for the time being.