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).
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.
I recommend pipx for a nice
isolated install.
pipx install slack-export-viewerOr just feel free to use pip as you like.
pip install slack-export-viewerslack-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`]
--help Show this message and exit.- 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/zipIf 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).
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...
┌— 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...
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=generalStart a development server by running app.py in the root directory:
python3 app.py -z /Absolute/path/to/archive.zip --debugCredit 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