a fork of https://gist.github.com/Chandler/fb7a070f52883849de35

My fork is solely to document how to use the code with python3. If you are unfamiliar with python3 but own a mac laptop.

The script finds all channels, private channels and direct messages that your user participates in. it downloads the complete history for those converations and writes each conversation out to seperate json files.

This user centric history gathering is nice because the official slack data exporter only exports public channels.

PS, this only works if your slack team has a paid account which allows for unlimited history.

PPS, this use of the API is blessed by Slack. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248

If you want to export the contents of your own private groups and direct messages please see our API documentation.

• step 1 visit https://api.slack.com/docs/oauth-test-tokens and click "generate-test-token"

  open 'https://api.slack.com/docs/oauth-test-tokens'

• step 2 check https://api.slack.com/tokens

  open 'https://api.slack.com/tokens'

A simple usage example

cd slack-history-export/
brew install python3
pip3 install pipenv
pipenv --python=/usr/local/bin/python3 shell
pipenv install
pipenv run python slack_history.py --token='123token'

other usage examples

pipenv run python slack_history.py --token='123token'
pipenv run python slack_history.py --token='123token' --dryRun=True
pipenv run python slack_history.py --token='123token' --skipDirectMessages
pipenv run python slack_history.py --token='123token' --skipDirectMessages --skipPrivateChannels

see ./slack_history.py