Skip to content

Saving and loading

Saving a complete Moulti instance

Click Save or hit s in Moulti to export (almost) all shown contents to text files. Specifically, Moulti creates a new directory named after the instance (MOULTI_INSTANCE environment variable) and the current date and time. This export directory is created in the directory specified by the MOULTI_SAVE_PATH environment variable or, alternatively, in Moulti's current working directory.

The format is straightforward:

  • each step is exported as a JSON file reflecting its properties and a log file reflecting its contents;
  • an extra JSON file stores instance properties.
$ ls -al social-preview-2024-02-23T18-52-10.883600/
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group   61 2024-02-23 18:52:10 0-instance.properties.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 1.8K 2024-02-23 18:52:10 1-title.contents.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group  394 2024-02-23 18:52:10 1-title.properties.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group  554 2024-02-23 18:52:10 2-step_ping.contents.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group  376 2024-02-23 18:52:10 2-step_ping.properties.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group   34 2024-02-23 18:52:10 3-collapsed.contents.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group  310 2024-02-23 18:52:10 3-collapsed.properties.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 9.3K 2024-02-23 18:52:10 4-script.contents.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group  273 2024-02-23 18:52:10 4-script.properties.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group  567 2024-02-23 18:52:10 5-poll.properties.json

Limitations

  • If a question or inputquestion widget was configured with --password, then its value gets exported as a series of * characters.
  • Moulti does not tinker with file permissions; therefore, the resulting files have default ownership and permissions; if necessary, use e.g. umask or newgrp to alter this behavior.

Saving a single Moulti step

Hit c to copy the contents of the currently focused step to the clipboard. Hit w to do the same while preserving styles and colors (as ANSI escape codes). Moulti emits a notification reflecting whether the copy operation succeeded. Copy operations typically fail due to environment-related causes. The pyperclip documentation states most of the technical requirements:

If pyperclip fails, Moulti tries again using OSC 52, a special escape sequence terminals understand as "please push these data into the local clipboard". This has the side-effect of making copy work over SSH but your terminal may or may not support OSC 52.

This behavior can be controlled through environment variable MOULTI_CLIPBOARD_COPY:

  • MOULTI_CLIPBOARD_COPY=pyperclip: Moulti shall use only pyperclip;
  • MOULTI_CLIPBOARD_COPY=terminal-osc-52: Moulti shall use only OSC 52;
  • any other value: Moulti first tries pyperclip; if it fails, it tries OSC 52.

Loading / restoring

Here is the typical way to restore a Moulti instance: 

moulti run moulti load social-preview-2024-02-23T18-52-10.883600/

Explanations: moulti run moulti load is NOT a typo. The command above:

  1. starts a new Moulti instance
  2. run asks the instance to run a command; here, this command is not a script but...
  3. moulti load path/to/saved/directory, i.e. a Moulti CLI command that reads the contents of the given directory and loads it into the Moulti instance.