slack-export-viewer 0.3.2

Slack Export Archive Viewer

# 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 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.


## 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.


## Installation

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

```bash
pipsi 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.
--debug
--help Show this message and exit.
```


## 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