signal-export 3.0.0b7

Export Signal conversations to Markdown and HTML

signal-export

⚠️ WARNING: Because the latest versions of Signal Desktop protect the database encryption key, this tool currently only works on macOS and Linux. Solutions for Windows will hopefully come soon from the community. Discussion happening in this thread.

Export chats from the Signal Desktop app to Markdown and HTML files with attachments. Each chat is exported as an individual .md/.html file and the attachments for each are stored in a separate folder. Attachments are linked from the Markdown files and displayed in the HTML (pictures, videos, voice notes).

Currently this seems to be the only way to get chat history out of Signal!

Adapted from mattsta/signal-backup, which I suspect will be hard to get working now.

Example

An export for a group conversation looks as follows:

[2019-05-29, 15:04] Me: How is everyone?
[2019-05-29, 15:10] Aya: We're great!
[2019-05-29, 15:20] Jim: I'm not.

Images are attached inline with ![name](path) while other attachments (voice notes, videos, documents) are included as links like [name](path) so a click will take you to the file.

This is converted to HTML at the end so it can be opened with any web browser. The stylesheet .css is still very basic but I'll get to it sooner or later.

🪟 Installation: Windows

If you need step-by-step instructions on things like enabling WSL2, please see the dedicated Windows Installation instructions.

In order to use this tool, you'll need to install WSL2, Docker and Python. The steps to do this are below. (NB: Improvements to these instructions are welcome.)

1. Enable Windows WSL2 feature
2. Install Docker Desktop with the WSL2 backend
3. Install Python 3.12 via Windows Store
4. In a PowerShell terminal, run

pip install signal-export

5. Run the script like this (you can enter any directory, it will be created)

sigexport C:\Temp\SignalExport

Run it without any arguments to get instructions about other options

sigexport

NB You may get an error like term 'sigexport' is not recognized, in which case you can use the following:

python -m sigexport.main ~/signal-chats

🐧 Installation: Linux

1. Install Docker (including following the post-installation steps for managing Docker as a non-root user).

2. Make sure you have Python installed.

3. Install this package:

pip install signal-export

4. Then run the script! It will do some Docker stuff under the hood to get your data out of the encrypted database.

sigexport ~/signal-chats
# output will be saved to the supplied directory

Linux without Docker

1. Install the required libraries.

sudo apt install libsqlite3-dev tclsh libssl-dev

2. Then clone sqlcipher and install it:

git clone https://github.com/sqlcipher/sqlcipher.git
cd sqlcipher
./configure --enable-tempstore=yes CFLAGS="-DSQLITE_HAS_CODEC" LDFLAGS="-lcrypto -lsqlite3"
make && sudo make install

3. Then you can install and run signal-export without Docker:

pip install 'signal-export[sql]'
sigexport --no-use-docker ...

🍏 Installation: macOS

To use it with Docker, just follow the standard Linux instructions above.

macOS without Docker

1. Install Homebrew.
2. Run brew install openssl sqlcipher
3. Export some needed env vars:

export C_INCLUDE_PATH="$(brew --prefix sqlcipher)/include"
export LIBRARY_PATH="$(brew --prefix sqlcipher)/lib"

4. Then you can install and run signal-export without Docker:

pip install 'signal-export[sql]'
sigexport --no-use-docker ...

🚀 Usage

Please fully exit your Signal app before proceeding, otherwise you will likely encounter an I/O disk error, due to the message database being made read-only, as it was being accessed by the app.

See the full help info:

sigexport --help

Disable pagination on HTML:

sigexport --paginate=0 ~/signal-chats

List available chats and exit:

sigexport --list-chats

Export only the selected chats:

sigexport --chats=Jim,Aya ~/signal-chats

You can add --source /path/to/source/dir/ if the script doesn't manage to find the Signal config location. Default locations per OS are below. The directory should contain a folder called sql with db.sqlite inside it.

• Linux: ~/.config/Signal/
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Signal/
• Windows: ~/AppData/Roaming/Signal/

You can also use --old /previously/exported/dir/ to merge the new export with a previous one. Nothing will be overwritten! It will put the combined results in whatever output directory you specified and leave your previos export untouched. Exercise is left to the reader to verify that all went well before deleting the previous one.

🗻 No-Python install

I don't recommend this, and you will have issues with file-ownership and other stuff. You can also run the Docker image directly, it just requires copy-pasting a much-longer command and being careful with volume mounts.

First set the appropriate environment variables for your OS:

# Only enter one of these!
SIGNAL_INPUT="$HOME/.config/Signal"                             # Linux
SIGNAL_INPUT="$HOME/snap/signal-desktop/current/.config/Signal" # Snap
SIGNAL_INPUT="$HOME/Library/Application Support/Signal"         # macOS
SIGNAL_INPUT="$HOME/AppData/Roaming/Signal"                     # Powershell

# And your output location (must be an absolute path)
SIGNAL_OUTPUT="$HOME/Downloads/signal-output"

Then run the below command, which pulls in the environment variables you set above.

# Note that the --overwrite flag is necessary when running like this
# careful where you point it!
docker run --rm \
  --net none \
  -v "$SIGNAL_INPUT:/Signal:ro" \
  -v "$SIGNAL_OUTPUT:/output" \
    carderne/sigexport:latest \
    --overwrite /output \         # this line is obligatory!
    --chats Jim                   # this line isn't

Then you should be able to use the Usage instructions as above.

Development

git clone https://github.com/carderne/signal-export.git
cd signal-export
rye sync --no-lock

Various dev commands:

rye fmt         # format
rye lint        # lint
rye run check   # typecheck
rye run test    # test
rye run sig     # run signal-export

Similar things

• signal-backup-decode might be easier if you use Android!
• signal2html also Android only