Where Gemini CLI stores your session history

Gemini CLI saves every session automatically, per project, and cleans them up after 30 days unless you change it.

#Where the files are

~/.gemini/
├── projects.json                  # project folder -> project id
└── tmp/
    └── my-app/                    # project id
        └── chats/
            ├── session-2026-10-29T09-14-ab12cd34.jsonl
            └── checkpoint-<tag>.json    # saved with /chat save

The project id is the project folder's name, lowercased and slugified, with -1, -2 added when two projects share a name. Older versions used a hash of the path; those folders are migrated automatically. Some documentation still describes the hash.

On Windows the tree is under C:\Users\<user>\.gemini. GEMINI_CLI_HOME moves it.

#What is inside

Each file opens with session details (sessionId, startTime, lastUpdated, summary), followed by messages with id, timestamp, type and content. Model messages add toolCalls, thoughts, model and tokens.

#Keep sessions longer

In ~/.gemini/settings.json:

{
  "general": {
    "sessionRetention": { "enabled": true, "maxAge": "365d" }
  }
}

maxCount caps the number of sessions instead; minRetention (default one day) protects recent ones.

#Resume, share and delete

gemini --resume              # the latest session
gemini --resume 3            # by index or session id
gemini --list-sessions
gemini --delete-session <id>

Inside the CLI:

• /resume opens a session browser (x deletes the selected one).
• /chat save <tag>, /chat list, /chat resume <tag>, /chat delete <tag> manage named checkpoints.
• /chat share file.md or file.json exports the conversation.
• /quit --delete leaves and deletes the current session.

#Privacy notes

Sessions are stored only on your machine. Prompts are sent to Google's API under the terms shown by /privacy.

The groundedby evaluator does not read Gemini CLI sessions yet.