# Slack Export Viewer

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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).

![Preview](screenshot.png)


## Contents

* [Overview](#overview)
* [Installation](#installation)
* [Usage](#usage)
* [Acknowledgements](#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 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.


## Installation

I recommend [`pipx`](https://github.com/pipxproject/pipx) for a nice
isolated install.

```bash
pipx install slack-export-viewer
```

Or just feel free to use `pip` as you like.

```bash
pip install slack-export-viewer
```

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

```bash
$ 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
  --help                    Show this message and exit.
```


## Usage

### 1) Grab your Slack team's export

* Visit [https://my.slack.com/services/export](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

```bash
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.

## 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...
```

### 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...
```

## Acknowledgements

Credit to Pieter Levels whose [blog post](https://levels.io/slack-export-to-html/) 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