messages
See below for is an example code on how to pull messages from a channel in Python.
- It uses the official Python Slack library and calls
conversations_history with paging. It will therefore work with
any type of channel and can fetch large amounts of messages if
needed.
- The result will be written to a file as JSON array.
- You can specify channel and max message to be retrieved
threads
Note that the conversations.history endpoint will not return thread messages. Those have to be retrieved additionaly with one call to conversations.replies for every thread you want to retrieve messages for.
Threads can be identified in the messages for each channel by checking for the threads_ts property in the message. If it exists there is a thread attached to it. See this page for more details on how threads work.
IDs
This script will not replace IDs with names though. If you need that here are some pointers how to implement it:
- You need to replace IDs for users, channels, bots, usergroups (if on a paid plan)
- You can fetch the lists for users, channels and usergroups from the API with
users_list, conversations_list and usergroups_list respectively, bots need to be fetched one by one with bots_info (if needed)
- IDs occur in many places in messages:
- user top level property
- bot_id top level property
- as link in any property that allows text, e.g.
<@U12345678> for users or <#C1234567> for channels. Those can occur in the top level text property, but also in attachments and blocks.
Example code
import os
import slack
import json
from time import sleep
CHANNEL = "C12345678"
MESSAGES_PER_PAGE = 200
MAX_MESSAGES = 1000
# init web client
client = slack.WebClient(token=os.environ['SLACK_TOKEN'])
# get first page
page = 1
print("Retrieving page {}".format(page))
response = client.conversations_history(
channel=CHANNEL,
limit=MESSAGES_PER_PAGE,
)
assert response["ok"]
messages_all = response['messages']
# get additional pages if below max message and if they are any
while len(messages_all) + MESSAGES_PER_PAGE <= MAX_MESSAGES and response['has_more']:
page += 1
print("Retrieving page {}".format(page))
sleep(1) # need to wait 1 sec before next call due to rate limits
response = client.conversations_history(
channel=CHANNEL,
limit=MESSAGES_PER_PAGE,
cursor=response['response_metadata']['next_cursor']
)
assert response["ok"]
messages = response['messages']
messages_all = messages_all + messages
print(
"Fetched a total of {} messages from channel {}".format(
len(messages_all),
CHANNEL
))
# write the result to a file
with open('messages.json', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
json.dump(
messages_all,
f,
sort_keys=True,
indent=4,
ensure_ascii=False
)
