Slack Export Viewer

A Slack Export archive viewer that allows you to easily view and share your Slack team's export (instead of having to dive into hundreds of JSON files).

Contents

• Overview
• Installation
• Usage
• Acknowledgements

Overview

slack-export-viewer is useful for small teams on a free Slack plan (limited to 10,000 messages) who overrun their budget and ocassionally need a nice interface to refer back to previous messages. You get a web interface to easily scroll through all channels in the export without having to look at individual JSON files per channel per day.

slack-export-viewer can be used locally on one machine for yourself to explore an export, it can be run on a headless server (as it is a Flask web app) if you also want to serve the content to the rest of your team, or it can output HTML for deploying a static website.

Installation

I recommend pipx for a nice isolated install.

pipx install slack-export-viewer

Or just feel free to use pip as you like.

pip install slack-export-viewer

slack-export-viewer will be installed as an entry-point; run from anywhere.

$ slack-export-viewer --help
Usage: slack-export-viewer [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -p, --port INTEGER        Host port to serve your content on
  -z, --archive PATH        Path to your Slack export archive (.zip file or
                            directory)  [required]
  -I, --ip TEXT             Host IP to serve your content on
  --no-browser              If you do not want a browser to open
                            automatically, set this.
  --channels TEXT           A comma separated list of channels to parse.
  --no-sidebar              Removes the sidebar.
  --no-external-references  Removes all references to external css/js/images.
  --test                    Runs in 'test' mode, i.e., this will do an archive
                            extract, but will not start the server, and
                            immediately quit.
  --debug
  --html-only               If you want static HTML only.
  -o, --output-dir PATH     Output directory for static HTML. [default: `html_output`]
  --html-only               If you want static HTML only, set this.
  --since [%Y-%m-%d]        Only show messages since this date.
  --help                    Show this message and exit.

Usage

1) Grab your Slack team's export

• Visit https://my.slack.com/services/export
• Create an export
• Wait for it to complete
• Refresh the page and download the export (.zip file) into whatever directory

2) Point slack-export-viewer to it

Point slack-export-viewer to the .zip file and let it do its magic

slack-export-viewer -z /path/to/export/zip

If everything went well, your archive will have been extracted and processed, and a browser window will have opened showing your #general channel from the export. Or, if the html-only flag was set, HTML files will be available in the html-output directory (or a different directory if specified).

CLI

There is now a CLI included as well. Currently the one command you can use is clearing the cache from slack-export-viewer from your %TEMP% directory; see usage:

└———→ slack-export-viewer-cli --help
Usage: slack-export-viewer-cli [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  clean  Cleans up any temporary files (including...
  export  Generates a single-file printable export for an archive file or...

Examples

┌— hamza@AURORAONE C:\Users\hamza
└———→ slack-export-viewer-cli clean
Run with -w to remove C:\Users\hamza\AppData\Local\Temp\_slackviewer
┌— hamza@AURORAONE C:\Users\hamza
└———→ slack-export-viewer-cli clean -w
Removing C:\Users\hamza\AppData\Local\Temp\_slackviewer...

Local Development

After installing the requirements in requirements.txt and dev-requirements.txt, define FLASK_APP as main and select any channels desired from an export:

export FLASK_APP=main && export SEV_CHANNELS=general

Start a development server by running app.py in the root directory:

python3 app.py -z /Absolute/path/to/archive.zip --debug

Acknowledgements

Credit to Pieter Levels whose blog post and PHP script I used as a jumping off point for this.

Improvements over Pieter's script

slack-export-viewer is similar in core functionality but adds several things on top to make it nicer to use:

• An installable application
• Automated archive extraction and retention
• A Slack-like sidebar that lets you switch channels easily
• Much more "sophisticated" rendering of messages
• A Flask server which lets you serve the archive contents as opposed to a PHP script which does static file generation