Hosting Your Own Slack Archive

by marten

Recently, Slack changed their payment model such that free accounts can only see 90 days or 10,000 messages of history. However, those messages aren't deleted: they still exist and are freely accessible to you, just in a less-than-helpful format. This guide will show you how to stand up your own Slack Archive website so that you and your fellow Slack members can use your archive as a reference when you're looking for old conversations.

Downloading Your Slack Archive

From Slack, click on the workspace menu > Settings & administration > Workplace settings.

  • Click Import & Export Data.
  • Click the Export tab.
  • Choose "Entire history" for your Export date range, then click Start Export.

Save the zip file you received during this process. I renamed this file to export.zip.

Converting Your Slack Archive to HTML

There are two excellent projects on Github to help us with this step:

https://github.com/hfaran/slack-export-viewer - Hosts a website locally to display your Slack data.
https://github.com/hfaran/slack2html - Run slack-export-viewer and export your data as web assets (html, css, images etc.)

Clone the slack2html repo. You need to change a line in requirements.txt from click to click==8.1.3 to deal with some incompatibility issues between Flask and Click. After that, from the slack2html folder, run these commands:

mkdir out
python3 slack2html.py -z export.zip -o out

You can verify that the export worked by opening the file slack2html/out/index.html and confirming that your content is there.

If you're on Windows and having trouble getting this script to work, I recommend using WSL2 for your shell.

Setting Up Webhosting for a Static Site

If you already have web hosting for static files, you probably have your own idea about the fastest way to get your files hosted online. What I have here, is how to set up your site using DigitalOcean, Portainer, and nginx-proxy-manager. This setup allows me to expand to serve more domains and subdomains with different containers; i.e. I can run multiple services off of one DigitalOcean droplet.

Setting Up a Droplet on DigitalOcean

In DigitalOcean, create a Droplet from the Docker image in the marketplace:

Installing Portainer

Once your droplet is running, you can install Portainer, which will give you a web interface to manage your Docker containers. From the console of your droplet, run this:

docker volume create portainer_data
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9443:9443 --name portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce:latest

From there, you can navigate to {droplet-ip}:9443 and create a login for Portainer.

Installing nginx-proxy-manager

Once inside, choose your local environment, then navigate to Stacks and click Add Stack. You can follow the instructions here to create a docker-compose file. This page also includes the default admin user credentials. I used something like this:

version: "3.3"
services:
  npm-app:
    image: 'jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:latest'
    container_name: npm-app
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '80:80' # Public HTTP Port
      - '443:443' # Public HTTPS Port
      - '81:81' # Admin Web Port
      # Add any other Stream port you want to expose
      # - '21:21' # FTP
    environment:
      DB_MYSQL_HOST: "npm-db"
      DB_MYSQL_PORT: 3306
      DB_MYSQL_USER: "npm"
      DB_MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${DB_MYSQL_PASSWORD}
      DB_MYSQL_NAME: "npm"
      # Uncomment the line below if IPv6 is not enabled on your host
      # DISABLE_IPV6: 'true'
    volumes:
      - ./npm-data:/data:Z
      - ./letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt:Z
    depends_on:
      - npm-db
    networks:
      - npm-network
      - npm-internal

  npm-db:
    image: 'mariadb:latest'
    container_name: npm-db
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD}
      MYSQL_DATABASE: 'npm'
      MYSQL_USER: 'npm'
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${DB_MYSQL_PASSWORD}
    volumes:
      - ./npm-data/mysql:/var/lib/mysql:Z
    networks:
      - npm-internal

networks:
  npm-internal:
  npm-network:
    external: true

Note that you will need to set environment variables for DB_MYSQL_PASSWORD and MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD which should be set to something secure. You will also need to create a network named npm-network to enable communication between nginx-proxy-manager and your other containers.

Loading Content Into nginx

From the container npm-app, open the console. From here, you want to upload your files to the container. I ran a script like this:

cd /data
mkdir subdomain.example.com
cd subdomain.example.com/
# here, use a tool to upload content.zip
unzip content.zip 
rm content.zip

Setting Up Authentication

To set up Basic authentication, you'll want to do something like this to set up a single username/password combination that you'll use to authenticate to your site:

cd /etc
openssl passwd # util for generating a password hash
echo "{username}:{hashed password}" > .htpasswd

Once this is set up, you can log in to nginx-proxy-manager by navigating to {your droplet IP}:81.

Configuring nginx-proxy-manager

Under Details, add your domain/subdomain with a forward host IP of 127.0.0.1 on port 80.

On the SSL tab, you can request an SSL Certificate. This will work as long as you have set up an A record with your DNS registrar.

Under Advanced Configuration, use this custom configuration:

location / {
  root /data/subdomain.example.com;
  auth_basic "Authorization Required";
  auth_basic_user_file  "/etc/.htpasswd";
}

At this point, you can navigate to your host subdomain.example.com and you should see your Slack archive!