slackdump

Slack Dumper

Purpose: archive your private and public Slack messages, users, channels, files and emojis. Generate Slack Export without admin privileges.

[Slackdump screenshot]

Quick links:

• Installation And Quickstart

• Join the discussion in Telegram.

• Buy me a cup of tea, or use GitHub Sponsors button on the top of the page.

• [Go reference]

• Using with AI Agents (MCP Server)

• Slack MCP Server (no permissions required)

• Github CLI Slackdump extension

• How to's:

  • Mattermost migration steps
  • SlackLogViewerとSlackdumpを一緒に使用する
  • v1 Overview on Medium.com (outdated)

[!WARNING]

Enterprise Workspaces Security Alerts

Depending on your Slack plan and security settings, using Slackdump may trigger Slack security alerts and/or notify workspace administrators of unusual or automated access/scraping attempts.

You are responsible for ensuring your use complies with your organisation’s policies and Slack’s terms of service.

See Enterprise Workspace Tips.

Description

Typical use scenarios:

• archive your private conversations from Slack when the administrator does not allow you to install applications OR you don't want to use potentially privacy-violating third-party tools;
• archive channels from Slack when you're on a free "no archive" subscription; so you don't lose valuable knowledge in those channels;
• create a Slack Export archive without admin access;
• create incremental Slack archives, which is particularly useful for free workspaces with 90-day limits;
• save your favourite emojis; AND
• analyse you Slack data with AI Agent using Slackdump MCP Server.

There are several modes of operation

1. List users/channels
2. Dumping messages and threads
3. Creating a Slack Export in Mattermost or Standard modes.
4. Creating an Archive (Sqlite database or stored as json+gz)
5. Converting an archive to other formats (Export, Dump).
6. Emoji download mode.
7. Viewing Slack export, dump or archive files or directories (displays images).
8. Search mode (messages and files).
9. Resuming previous archive (adding new messages to an existing archive).
10. Local MCP Server to use with Opencode, Claude, or any other AI tool supporting mcp over STDIO or HTTP.
11. Database tools: merge multiple archives, remove duplicates, and clean up unfinished sessions (slackdump tools merge/dedupe/cleanup).

Run slackdump help to see all available options.

Installation and Quickstart

On macOS, you can install Slackdump with Homebrew:

brew install slackdump

On other Operating Systems, please follow these steps:

1. Download the latest release for your operating system from the releases page.
2. Unpack the archive to any directory.
3. Run the ./slackdump or slackdump.exe executable (see note below).
4. You know the drill: use arrow keys to select the menu item, and Enter (or Return) to confirm.
5. Follow these quickstart instructions.

[!NOTE] On Windows and macOS you may be presented with "Unknown developer" window, this is fine. Reason for this is that the executable hasn't been signed by the developer certificate.

To work around this:

• on Windows: click "more information", and press "Run Anyway" button.
• on macOS 14 Sonoma and prior: open the folder in Finder, hold Option and double click the executable, choose Run.
• on macOS 15 Sequoia and later: start the slackdump, OS will show the "Unknown developer" window, then go to System Preferences -> Security and Privacy -> General, and press "Open Anyway" button.

Getting Help

• Quickstart guide: slackdump help quickstart, read online.
• Generic command overview: man ./slackdump.1
• Ez-Login 3000 Guide.
• What's new in V4: slackdump help whatsnew, read online.

Running Slackdump from a Repo Checkout

If you've cloned the repository and want to run slackdump directly without downloading a release, you can do one of the following:

1. Build and run (creates an executable):

   go build -o slackdump ./cmd/slackdump
   ./slackdump wiz
   

2. Run directly:

   go run ./cmd/slackdump wiz
   

Note: You need Go installed on your system (see go.mod for the version)

Slackord2: Migrating to Discord

If you're migrating to Discord, the recommended way is to use Slackord2 — a great tool with a nice GUI, that is compatible with the export files generated by Slackdump.

User Guide

For more advanced features and instructions, please see the User Guide, and read slackdump help pages.

Previewing Results

Once the workspace data is dumped, you can run built-in viewer:

slackdump view <zip or directory>

The built-in viewer supports all types of dumps:

1. Slackdump Archive format;
2. Standard and Mattermost Slack Export;
3. Dump mode files

You can also convert your output file to a browsable static HTML archive:

slackdump convert -f html -o my_html_archive <zip or directory>

or use one of the following tools to preview the export results:

• SlackLogViewer - a fast and powerful Slack Export viewer written in C++, works on Export files (images won't be displayed, unless you used an export token flag).
• Slackdump2Html - a great Python application that converts Slack Dump to a static browsable HTML. It works on Dump mode files.
• slack export viewer - Slack Export Viewer is a well known viewer for slack export files. Supports displaying files if saved in the "Standard" file mode.

Slackdump MCP server

Slackdump offers a read-only MCP server with the following features:

• analyse the data in the archive (any type)
• provide help with command line flags

Available MCP tools:

The server supports both stdio (agent-managed) and HTTP transports.

Quick project setup

Scaffold a ready-to-use project directory pre-configured for your AI tool:

slackdump mcp -new opencode   ~/my-slack-project   # OpenCode
slackdump mcp -new claude-code ~/my-slack-project  # Claude Code
slackdump mcp -new copilot    ~/my-slack-project   # VS Code / GitHub Copilot
slackdump mcp -new codex      ~/my-slack-project   # Codex

Each command creates the MCP config file and installs bundled Slackdump skill / instruction files so the agent knows how to work with your archive out of the box.

To learn how to set it up with Codex, Claude Desktop, VS Code/GitHub Copilot, or OpenCode, see:

slackdump help mcp

or refer to the Slackdump MCP command help page.

Using as a library

Download:

go get github.com/rusq/slackdump/v4

Example

package main

import (
  "context"
  "log"

  "github.com/rusq/slackdump/v4"
  "github.com/rusq/slackdump/v4/auth"
)

func main() {
  provider, err := auth.NewValueAuth("xoxc-...", "xoxd-...")
  if err != nil {
      log.Print(err)
      return
  }
  sd, err := slackdump.New(context.Background(), provider)
  if err != nil {
      log.Print(err)
      return
  }
  _ = sd
}

See Package Documentation.

Using Custom Logger

Slackdump uses a "log/slog" package, it defaults to "slog.Default()". Set the default slog logger to the one you want to use.

If you were using logger.Silent before, you would need to implement a discarding Handler for slog.

FAQ

Do I need to create a Slack application?

No, you don't. Just run the application and EZ-Login 3000 will take care of the authentication or, alternatively, grab that token and cookie from the browser Slack session. See User's Guide.

I'm getting "invalid_auth" error

Run slackdump workspace new <name or url> to reauthenticate.

How to read the export file?

slackdump view <ZIP-archive or directory>

My Slack Workspace is on the Free plan. Can I get data older than 90-days?

No, unfortunately you can't. Slack doesn't allow to export data older than 90 days for free workspaces, the API does not return any data before 90 days for workspaces on the Free plan.

What's the difference between "archive", "export" and "dump"?

"Archive" is the new format introduced in v3, it minimises the memory use while scraping the data and also has a universal structure that can be converted into export and dump formats at will by using the "convert" command.

"Export" format aims to replicate the files generated when exporting a Slack workspace for compatibility.

"Dump" format has one channel per file, there's no workspace information nor any users stored. Should it be required, one must get users and channels by running slackdump list command.

Behind the scenes slackdump always uses the "archive" file format for all operations except "emoji" and "list", and converts to other formats on the fly, removing the temporary archive files afterwards.

Thank you

Big thanks to all contributors, who submitted a pull request, reported a bug, suggested a feature, helped to reproduce, or spent time chatting with me on the Telegram or Slack to help to understand the problem or feature and tested the proposed solution.

See CONTRIBUTORS.md for the full list of contributors.

Also, I'd like to thank current sponsors:

• @malsatin
• @angellk

And everyone who made a donation to support the project in the past and keep supporting the project:

• Davanum S.
• Vivek R.
• Fabian I.
• Ori P.
• Shir B. L.
• Emin G.
• Robert Z.
• Sudhanshu J.

License

Slackdump is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPLv3).

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.