Fri 25 December 2015 | tags: slack, configuration, json, general, backup, communication, planet, -- (permalink)
How I migrated the locked default channel on Slack.
Slack is a communication platform built for teams. While it is free by default, there are features reserved for paid users. However, the free version already comes with a ton of cool features, and is highly usable as is, especially for teams that are relatively small. My team has stuck with this unpaid version of the application for a few months.
Recently, we decided to have our clients join our Slack team, with some envisaged benefits:
- It would ease the process of keeping the client up-to-date on project progress
- It would bring our clients to our preferred communication platform, bringing them all in one place
- We could leverage some of the many tools available for use with Slack to improve our communication with clients. It's worth noting that Slack is very API friendly.
In doing this, we were presented with a small challenge. All of our previous conversations which had mostly being in the public, general channel, #general, were now open to our newly signed-on client. Some of these conversations obviously included stuff we would rather be more privy about. This meant I had to quickly find a way to migrate -- I chose not to delete -- the messages in the hope that he had not scrolled back through the channel's message log.
This would have been easier if Slack allowed certain modifications to the default channel named #general.[1] For instance, Slack prevents the deletion of this channel. On top of that, Slack puts some restrictions on private channels:
- They can't be deleted, but can be archived.
- They can't be changed to public channels even though the reverse is possible.
These limitations notwithstanding, the following explains my approach to tackling the problem.
First I used Slack's export feature to backup all of our conversations, including channel information. A caveat here is, Slack does not include private channels' data with exported data by default,[2] but thankfully, we hadn't any private rooms at the time.
Now, Slack exports team data in JSON format, making it very easy to work with. Having downloaded the exported data, I started looking through it for parts that I could tweak.
There were some top-level (root folder) files which included meta-data about users, teams and channels. Then there were also folders for each channel, in which, conversation logs were kept, grouped by days.
Next, I edited the channels.json file in the top-level directory, and changed the name of the channel #general, which contained the messages, to some new name. Then I went and renamed the folder named general, to this new name.
With these changes in place, I compressed the modified files alongside the unmodified ones into a zip archive; the original Slack-exported data had come in a zip file as well. Slack allows you to import this zip file into your Slack team, which was what I did next.
During the import, Slack automatically tried to match detected channels (from the import) with existing ones, after-which I was presented with a page that displayed the mapping suggestions. I simply set it not to map but create new channels instead.
Upon successful completion of the imports, I went on to delete all the messages in the existing #general channel. Those messages were now the contents of a newly minted channel, created using the new name I previously gave to it.
With all these in place, I did two more things:
- I edited and marked the new channel as private, and
- I welcomed our new client to our Slack space ;)
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More on Slack's default channel - #general
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Exporting private data from Slack