The slack export viewer is a command line tool that lets you filter and render a slack export into text files for easy analysis and reading.
slack-export-viewer
is a useful tool for teams who are running a free slack instance, and might have to produce a report covering the conversations, or at least read it in a standard text browser
- 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
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, processed, and browser window will have opened showing your #general channel from the export.
I recommend pipsi
for a nice
isolated install.
pipsi 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)
[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.
--debug
--help Show this message and exit.
Credit to Pieter Levels whose blog post and PHP script I used as a jumping off point for this.
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