Every time I restart the PubSub emulator, the topics/subscriptions are gone. Currently, I have a script that creates the topics and subscriptions each time the emulator starts:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/56994166/1237919
Is this state not persisted? Is there a way to persist state?
The emulator runs in memory; state is not persisted across runs. If you want to persist state, you will need to use the real Cloud Pub/Sub service. You could instead re-create your topics and subscriptions each time you start the emulator to get to the desired starting state.