Customizable retention period for sessions

[BobbyWang0120]

What feature would you like to see?

I would like Codex CLI to periodically clean up old conversation history files based on a user-defined retention window. Currently, Codex retains every conversation indefinitely, so the history folder grows larger over time even though many of those conversations are no longer useful.

The proposed feature would allow users to specify a retention period (for example, 30 or 60 days), and Codex would automatically remove conversations older than that window. This would help keep the history directory at a manageable size and prevent storage from being consumed by outdated or irrelevant sessions. It would also be helpful if the retention duration were configurable so users could choose the period that best fits their needs.

Additional information

No response

[kt-devoss]

+1

Also, it would be great if retention could be configured per session, not only globally.

In practice, I have different types of sessions:

• one-off review requests or quick investigations that I’m fine with deleting very quickly (e.g., after 1 hour or a few hours; ideally configurable either at creation time or later, including “ephemeral” sessions that disappear soon),
• and long-running sessions that I don’t want to be removed automatically.

So it would be helpful to have:

• a way to set a short retention/TTL when starting a session (or mark a session as ephemeral),
• and a pin / keep option to prevent certain sessions from being cleaned up.

Finally, I’d like the same capability not only in the CLI but also in the VS Code Extension, so retention/TTL and pinning can be managed consistently from both environments.

[mrexodia]

If you add this, please do not enable it by default.