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slack-exporter

A Slack bot and standalone script for exporting messages and file attachments from public and private channels, using Slack's new Conversations API.

A similar service is provided by Slack for workspace admins at https://my.slack.com/services/export (where my can be replaced with your full workspace name to refer to a workspace different than your default). However, it can only access public channels, while slack-exporter can retrieve data from any channel accessible to your user account.

Authentication with Slack

There are two ways to use slack-exporter (detailed below). Both require a Slack API token to be able to communicate with your workspace.

  1. Visit https://api.slack.com/apps/ and sign in to your workspace.
  2. Click Create New App. If prompted to select "how you'd like to configure your app's scopes", choose the App Manifest option. You can configure the app manually instead, but you will be prompted to enter an app name and additional steps to set up permissions instead of the single step below. Once creates, select your workspace.
  3. You should then be prompted for an app manifest. Paste the contents of the slack.yaml file (in the root of this repo) into the YAML box.
  4. Select Install to Workspace at the top of that page (or Reinstall to Workspace if you have done this previously) and accept at the prompt.
  5. Copy the OAuth Access Token (which will generally start with xoxp for user-level permissions and may be located in a section like "OAuth & Permissions" in the sidebar).

Usage

As a standalone script

exporter.py can create an archive of all conversation history in your workspace which is accessible to your user account.

  1. Either add

    SLACK_USER_TOKEN = xoxp-xxxxxxxxxxxxx...

    to a file named .env in the same directory as exporter.py, or run the following in your shell (replacing the value with the user token you obtained in the Authentication with Slack section above).

    export SLACK_USER_TOKEN=xoxp-xxxxxxxxxxxxx...

  2. If you cloned this repo, make sure that dependencies are installed by running pip install -r requirements.txt in the repo root directory.

  3. Run python exporter.py --help to view the available export options. You can test that access to Slack is working by listing available conversations: python exporter.py --lc.

As a Slack bot

bot.py is a Slack bot that responds to "slash commands" in Slack channels (e.g., /export-channel). To connect the bot to the Slack app generated in Authentication with Slack, create a file named .env in the root directory of this repo, and add the following line:

SLACK_USER_TOKEN = xoxp-xxxxxxxxxxxxx...

Save this file and run the Flask application in bot.py such that the application is exposed to the Internet. This can be done via a web server (e.g., Heroku), as well as via the ngrok service, which assigns your localhost server a public URL.

To use the ngrok method:

  1. Download the appropriate binary.

  2. Run python bot.py

  3. Run the ngrok binary with path/to/ngrok http 5000, where 5000 is the port on which the Flask application (step 2) is running. Copy the forwarding HTTPS address provided.

  4. Create the following slash commands will be created (one for each applicable Flask route in bot.py):

    Command Request URL Arguments Example Usage
    /export-channel https://[host_url]/slack/export-channel json | text /export-channel text
    /export-replies https://[host_url]/slack/export-replies json | text /export-replies json

    To do this, uncomment the slash-commands section in slack.yaml and replace YOUR_HOST_URL_HERE with something like https://xxxxxxxxxxxx.ngrok.io (if using ngrok). Then navigate back to OAuth & Permissions and click (Re)install to Workspace to add these slash commands to the workspace (ensure the OAuth token in your .env file is still correct).

Author

Seb Seager

License

This software is available under the GPL.