Fix CLI argument parity with cursor-chat-browser-python: missing --exclude-rules, state format mismatch, and use_reloader inconsistency

[wpak-ai]

Summary

A cross-project audit against cursor-chat-browser-python found five bugs in this project and three in the reference project. All are now fixed and covered by regression tests.

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Bugs fixed in claude-code-chat-browser

Bug 1 — app.py: Missing --exclude-rules / -e flag

cursor-chat-browser-python/app.py accepts --exclude-rules PATH (short: -e) to load a privacy filter file at startup and stores the parsed rules in app.config["EXCLUSION_RULES"] for all API routes. This project had no such flag.

Impact: No way to exclude sensitive sessions from the web UI export endpoint, even though the concept was already implemented in the reference project.

Fix:

• Added --exclude-rules/-e to app.py's argparse
• Added exclusion_rules_path parameter to create_app()
• Rules are loaded via the new utils/exclusion_rules.py and stored in app.config
• api/export_api.py bulk export now reads EXCLUSION_RULES from app config and filters sessions

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Bug 2 — app.py: use_reloader=False instead of platform-aware reloader

cursor-chat-browser-python uses use_reloader=(sys.platform != "win32") — enabling the stat reloader on Linux/macOS while disabling it on Windows to avoid a Flask socket conflict. This project hardcoded use_reloader=False unconditionally, disabling the reloader even on platforms where it works correctly.

Fix: Changed to use_reloader=(sys.platform != "win32").

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Bug 3 — scripts/export.py: Missing --exclude-rules / -e flag

The CLI export had no way to filter out sensitive sessions. cursor-chat-browser-python/scripts/export.py has had this flag since its inception.

Fix:

• Added --exclude-rules/-e (dest exclude_rules) to both the top-level parser and the explicit export subcommand in build_parser()
• cmd_export() loads rules via utils/exclusion_rules.py and applies is_excluded_by_rules() per session, incrementing the skip counter on matches
• Created utils/exclusion_rules.py — a direct port of the reference project's module, with the default rules path changed to ~/.claude-code-chat-browser/exclusion-rules.txt

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Bug 4 — scripts/export.py: Export state file format incompatible with cursor-chat-browser-python

cursor-chat-browser-python writes export_state.json as:

{ "lastExportTime": "2026-02-25T12:00:00", "exportedCount": 42, "exportDir": "/path/to/out" }

This project wrote a flat mapping of session UUIDs to file modification timestamps:

{ "abc123...": 1740000000.123, "def456...": 1740001000.456 }

The three standard keys (lastExportTime, exportedCount, exportDir) were entirely absent, making the --since last state invisible to any tooling or cross-app check that reads from the reference format.

Fix:

• _save_state() now writes all four keys: lastExportTime (ISO string), exportedCount (int), exportDir (absolute path), and sessions (the per-session mtime dict, moved to a sub-key to preserve this project's fine-grained incremental export)
• _load_state() transparently migrates legacy flat files without modifying them on disk
• --since last behaviour is unchanged: per-session mtime comparison is preserved under the sessions key