slack-archive-bot

A bot that can search your slack message history. Makes it possible to search further back than 10,000 messages.

Requirements

1. Permission to install new apps to your Slack workspace.
2. python3
3. A publicly accessible URL to serve the bot from. (Slack recommends using ngrok to get around this.)

Installation

1. Clone this repo.

2. Install the requirements:

    pip install -r requirements.txt
   

3. If you want to include your existing slack messages, export your team's slack history. Download the archive and export it to a directory. Then run import.py on the directory. For example:

    python import.py export
   

   This will create a file slack.sqlite.

4. Create a new Slack app.

• Add the following bot token oauth scopes and install it to your workspace:

  • channels:history
  • channels:read
  • chat:write
  • groups:history (if you want to archive/search private channels)
  • groups:read (if you want to archive/search private channels)
  • im:history
  • users:read

5. Go to your app's App Home page and enable "Allow users to send Slash commands and messages from the messages tab".

6. Start slack-archive-bot with:

    SLACK_BOT_TOKEN=<BOT_TOKEN> SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET=<SIGNING_SECRET> python archivebot.py
   

Where SIGNING_SECRET is the "Signing Secret" from your app's "Basic Information" page and BOT_TOKEN is the "Bot User OAuth Access Token" from the app's "OAuth & Permissions" page.

Use python archivebot.py -h for a list of all command line options.

7. Go to the app's "Event Subscriptions" page and add the url to where slack-archive-bot is being served. The default port is 3333. (i.e. http://<ip>:3333/slack/events)

• Then add the following bot events:

  • channel_rename
  • group_rename (if you want to archive/search private channels)
  • member_joined_channel
  • member_left_channel
  • message.channels
  • message.groups (if you want to archive/search private channels)
  • message.im
  • user_change

Deploying Production Server Using WSGI

By default when you run python archivebot.py it will launch a development server. But they don't recommend using it in production. The following is an example of using Flask and Gunicorn to deploy slack-archive-bot, but it should work equally well with any other WSGI server.

1. pip install flask gunicorn
2. SLACK_BOT_TOKEN=<BOT_TOKEN> SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET=<SIGNING_SECRET> gunicorn flask_app:flask_app -c gunicorn_conf.py <other gunicorn args>
3. flask_app.py provides a thin wrapper around archivebot.app using slack_bolt.adapter.flask.SlackRequestHandler. There are many other adapters provided by bolt. To use them, simply from archivebot import app and wrap app.
4. gunicorn_conf.py ensures that the local database is updated when the server is started, but that it's not run for each worker.
5. You can use ARCHIVE_BOT_LOG_LEVEL and ARCHIVE_BOT_DATABASE_PATH to configure slack-archive-bot while running it via gunicorn.

Archiving New Messages

When running, ArchiveBot will continue to archive new messages for any channel it is invited to. To add the bot to your channels:

    /invite @ArchiveBot

If @ArchiveBot is the name you gave your bot user.

Searching

To search the archive, direct message (DM) @ArchiveBot with the search query. For example, sending the word "pizza" will return the first 10 messages that contain the word "pizza". There are a number of parameters that can be provided to the query. The full usage is:

    <query> from:<user> in:<channel> sort:asc|desc limit:<number>

    query: The text to search for.
    user: If you want to limit the search to one user, the username.
    channel: If you want to limit the search to one channel, the channel name.
    sort: Either asc if you want to search starting with the oldest messages,
        or desc if you want to start from the newest. Default asc.
    limit: The number of responses to return. Default 10.

Migrating from slack-archive-bot v0.1

slack-archive-bot v0.1 used the legacy Slack API which Slack ended support for in February 2021. To migrate to the new version:

• Follow the installation steps above to create a new slack app with all of the required permissions and event subscriptions.
• The biggest change in requirements with the new version is the move from the Real Time Messaging API to the Events API which necessitates having a publicly-accessible url that Slack can send events to. If you are unable to serve a public endpoint, you can use ngrok.

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome. From bugs to new features. I threw this together to meet my team's needs, but there's plenty I've overlooked.

License

Code released under the MIT license.