Copy a Single Codex Session to Another Machine

ai
Author

Andrea Zonca

Published

December 16, 2025

Download sourceContribute

You might want to copy a Codex session to another machine to continue a conversation started on one device, such as moving from a laptop to a desktop or server.

Each Codex chat is stored as a single .jsonl file under ~/.codex/sessions/.

1. Locate the session file

Sessions are organized by date:

~/.codex/sessions/YYYY/MM/DD/

Example:

rollout-2025-12-16T08-52-19-019b2813-b881-7813-afe8-bf072950e53b.jsonl

The long ID at the end uniquely identifies the chat.

2. Copy the session to the other machine

Copy only that file using scp. Make sure to create the destination directory on the remote machine first:

ssh sshhost "mkdir -p ~/.codex/sessions/2025/12/16"
scp ~/.codex/sessions/2025/12/16/rollout-2025-12-16T08-52-19-019b2813-b881-7813-afe8-bf072950e53b.jsonl \
    sshhost:~/.codex/sessions/2025/12/16/

3. Resume the Codex chat after transfer

Once Codex is running on the destination machine:

  1. Open Codex CLI.

  2. Run:

    /resume

  3. Select the transferred session from the list.

  4. Continue the conversation from the last message.

Codex restores the full conversation state directly from the .jsonl session file.

Notes

  • Do not copy history.jsonl or other files.
  • Keep the original filename and directory structure.
  • One .jsonl file always corresponds to one chat.