About

Key Characteristics

Overview

Description

Slackdump is a nice tool to quickly download channels from a Slack instance. It can enumerate all the channels (which includes the other users and all DMs and private group chats) available to the authenticated user, as well as download the content in JSON format.

Procedure Overview

1. download all the content from relevant channels using slackdump
2. extract just the username and messages using jq
3. use slackdump to extract the list of all users
4. replace (or augment) the data with the username
5. (Optional) run the content through an #LLM in order to extract summaries or specific information from the content

Usage

Installation and running the tool

1. Slackdump a tool to extract data from a Slack workspace
   1. Go to Releases and download a recent version for your system
   2. Extract the download to a specific directory where you’ll perform the extraction and analysis steps
   3. The tool is prompt-driven, so you can execute and follow its lead
   4. Hint: save the collected channel names and unique identifier to a file for easy reference, e.g. slackdump -c > channels.txt
   5. From this list, identify the channelID to be extracted.
   6. Run slackdump with no arguments
   7. Choose Export from the menu
   8. Type or paste in the channelID of interest.
   9. It will take some time, but this will not create a giant #JSON file of the extracted content.
2. jq is a common tool to parse json files
   1. Review the guide to Linux jq command, which is applicable to Mac or Windows, as well
3. Use a command like the following to extract just the message text from the json file
   jq '.messages[] | .text' filename.json