unexpected or undocumented truffle develop console objects persistence after restart

Issue

Deploying TestContract on truffle develop console worked and await TestContract.at(TestContract.address) worked. Then after truffle develop console restart running: await TestContract.at(TestContract.address) again returns Error: Cannot create instance of TestContract; no code at address 0x....

I searched online if truffle develop console does not persist something but could not find information on that and also the deployed contracts ARE persisted.

await TestContract.deployed() DOES work after restart.

Also: .getPastEvents() of the contract returns events before truffle develop console restart and does not return events (empty array) after truffle develop console restart.

Is this a bug? Or is there a missing documentation about what the console persists across restarts?

Environment

Windows 10 Truffle v5.0.12 (core: 5.0.12) Solidity - 0.5.2 (solc-js) Node v10.8.0 Web3.js v1.0.0-beta.37

[CruzMolina]

Since the json has the contract code then why does truffle only take it partially for autocomplete and .deployed() and does not also put the code on the blockchain after restart?

Interesting idea! I think the current plan is for truffle develop to be a “throw-away” chain that gets destroyed and refreshed on each restart, leaving it up to the user to migrate. However, I see how the current behavior of contract.deployed() is a bit confusing.

After looking into this a bit more, there may be a way to either have a truffle develop migration not save to the actual json artifacts (so after restarting truffle develop, the artifacts will be detected, but the develop network will not be found), or possibly have truffle develop remove the networks it added during the repl session when .exiting out. Will need to look into this more thoroughly.

[eggplantzzz]

So it looks like if we wanted to move forward on this, we would need to have a requirements gathering session to figure out what kind of behavior we actually want. Leaving this here until we can triage things.