Slack Dumper

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Read the set up guide on Medium.com

Purpose: dump slack messages, users and files using browser token and cookie.

Typical usecase scenarios:

• You want to archive your private convesations from slack but the administrator does not allow you to install applications.
• You are allowed to install applications in Slack but don't want to use the "cloud" tools for privacy concerns - god knows what those third party apps are retaining in their "clouds".

The library is "fit-for-purpose" quality and provided AS-IS. Can't say it's ready for production, as it lacks most of the unit tests, but will do for ad-hoc use.

Slackdump accepts two types of input: URL link of the channel or thread, or ID of the channel.

Usage

1. Download the archive from the Releases page for your operating system. (NOTE: MacOS users should download darwin release file).
2. Unpack
3. Change directory to where you have unpacked the archive.
4. Run ./slackdump -h to see help.

How to authenticate

Getting the authentication data

1. Open up your Slack in browser and login.

TOKEN

1. Open your browser Developer Console.
2. Go to the Network tab
3. In the toolbar, switch to Fetch/XHR view.
4. Open any channel or private conversation in Slack. You'll see a bunch of stuff appearing in Network panel.
5. In the list of requests, find the one starting with channels.prefs.get?, click it and click on Headers tab in the opened pane.
6. Scroll down, until you see Form Data
7. Grab the token: value (it starts with xoxc-), by right clicking the value and choosing "Copy Value".

If you don't see the token value in Poogle Chrome - switch to Payload tab, your token is waiting for you there.

COOKIE

1. Switch to Application tab and select Cookies in the left navigation pane.
2. Find the cookie with the name "d". That's right, just the letter "d".
3. Double-click the Value of this cookie.
4. Press Ctrl+C or Cmd+C to copy it's value to clipboard.
5. Save it for later.

Setting up the application

1. Create the file named .env next to where the slackdump executable in any text editor. Alternatively the file can be named secrets.txt or .env.txt.

2. Add the token and cookie values to it. End result should look like this:

   SLACK_TOKEN=xoxc-<...elided...>
   COOKIE=12345472908twp<...elided...>
   

3. Save the file and close the editor.

Dumping conversations

As it was already mentioned in the introduction, Slackdump supports two ways of providing the conversation IDs that you want to save:

• By ID: it expects to see Conversation IDs.
• By URL: it expects to see URLs. You can get URL by choosing "Copy Link" in the Slack on the channel or thread.

IDs or URLs can be passed on the command line or read from a file (using the -i command line flag), in that file, every ID or URL should be placed on a separate line. Slackdump can automatically detect if it's an ID or a URL.

Providing the list on the command line

Firstly, dump the channel list to choose what you want to dump:

slackdump -c

You will get the output resembling the following:

2021/10/31 17:32:34 initializing...
2021/10/31 17:32:35 retrieving data...
2021/10/31 17:32:35 done
ID           Arch  Saved  What
CHXXXXXXX    -     -      #everything
CHXXXXXXX    -     -      #everyone
CHXXXXXXX    -     -      #random
DHMAXXXXX    -     -      @slackbot
DNF3XXXXX    -     -      @alice
DLY4XXXXX    -     -      @bob

You'll need the value in the ID column.

To dump the channel, run the following command:

slackdump <ID1> [ID2] ... [IDn]

By default, slackdump generates a json file with the convesation. If you want the convesation to be saved to a text file as well, use the -r text command line parameter. See example below.

Example

Say, you want to dump convesations with @alice and @bob to the text files and also want to save all the files that you all shared in those convesations:

slackdump -r text -f DNF3XXXXX DLY4XXXXX https://....
          ━━━┯━━━ ━┯ ━━━┯━━━━━ ━━━┯━━━━━ ━━━━┯━━━━━┅┅
             │     │    │         │          │
             │     │    │         ╰─: @alice │
             │     │    ╰───────────: @bob   ┊
             │     ╰────────────────: save files
             ╰──────────────────────: text file output
         thread or conversation URL :────────╯

Conversation URL:

To get the conversation URL link, use this simple trick that they won't teach you at school:

1. In Slack, right click on the conversation you want to dump (in the channel navigation pane on the left)
2. Choose "Copy link".

Thread URL:

1. In Slack, open the thread that you want to dump.
2. The thread opens to the right of the main conversation window
3. On the first message of the thread, click on three vertical dots menu (not sure how it's properly called), choose "Copy link"

Run the slackdump and provide the URL link as an input:

slackdump -f  https://xxxxxx.slack.com/archives/CHM82GX00/p1577694990000400
          ━┯  ━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
           │        ╰─────: URL of the thread
           ╰──────────────: save files

Reading data from the file

Slackdump can read the list of the channels and URLs to dump from the file.

1. Create the file that will contain all the necessary IDs and/or URLs, I'll use "links.txt" in the example.

2. Copy/paste all the IDs and URLs into that file, one per line.

3. Run slackdump with "-i" command line flag. "-i" stands for "input":

   slackdump -i links.txt
             ━━━━┯━━━━━━━
                 │
                 ╰───────: instructs slackdump to use the file input
   

Dumping users

To view all users, run:

slackdump -u

By default, slackdump exports users in text format. If you need to output json, use -r json flag.

Dumping chanels

To view channels, that are visible to your account, including group conversations, archived chats and public channels, run:

slackdump -c

By default, slackdump exports users in text format. If you need to output json, use -r json flag.

As a library

Download:

go get github.com/rusq/slackdump

Use:

import "github.com/rusq/slackdump"

func main() {
  sd, err := slackdump.New(os.Getenv("TOKEN"), os.Getenv("COOKIE"))
  if err != nil {
      // handle
  }
  // ... read the docs
}

FAQ

Q: Do I need to create a Slack application?

A: No, you don't. You need to grab that token and cookie from the browser Slack session. See Usage in the top of the file.

Q: I'm getting ``invalid_auth``

A: Go get the new Cookie from the browser.

Bulletin Board

Messages that were conveyed with the donations:

• 25/01/2022: Stay away from TheSignChef.com, ya hear, they don't pay what they owe to their employees.