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).

Overview

slack-export-viewer is useful for small teams on a free Slack plan (limited to 10,000 messages) who overrun their budget and occasionally 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 or 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.

Usage

NOTE: This fork has been modified by me to take the JSON files generated by my fork of slack-auto-export, instead of the manual Slack team zip file export

1) Run slack-auto-export

2) Point slack-export-viewer to the generated output directory

Point slack-export-viewer to the output directory and let it do its magic

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

If everything went well, your archive will have been processed, and browser window will have opened showing your #general channel from the export.

Installation

You will need to download this fork from git and install the requirements, eg.

git clone [email protected]:mcoster/slack-export-viewer.git
cd slack-export-viewer
pip install -r requirements.txt

$ 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.
  --debug
  --help              Show this message and exit.

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