signal-export

Export chats from the Signal Desktop app to markdown files with attachments. Each chat is exported as an individual .md file and the attachments for each are stored in a separate folder. Attachments are linked from the markdown files and can be previewed with something like grip or Typora.

Currently this seems to be the only way to get chat history out of Signal.

Forked from https://github.com/mattsta/signal-backup

Example

An export for a group conversation looks as follows:

[2019-05-29, 15:04] Me: How is everyone?
[2019-05-29, 15:10] Aya: We're great!
[2019-05-29, 15:20] Jim: I'm not.

Images are attached inline with ![name](path) while other attachments (voice notes, videos, documents) are included as links like [name](path) so a click will take you to the file.

Usage

First clone and install requirements (preferably into a virtualenv):

git clone https://github.com/carderne/signal-export.git
cd signal-export
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then use the script as follows:

Usage: ./sigexport.py [OPTIONS] [DEST]

Options:
  -s, --source PATH  Path to Signal config and database
  -o, --old PATH     Path to previous export to merge with
  -o, --overwrite    Flag to overwrite existing output
  -m, --manual       Flag to manually decrypt the database
  --help             Show this message and exit.

This will attempt to find default Signal config location location for your OS and export to the given directory:

./sigexport.py exported

Add --overwrite to overwrite output files.

You can use --source /path/to/source/files if the script doesn't manage to find it. Default locations per OS:

Linux: ~/.config/Signal
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Signal
Windows: ~/AppData/Roaming/Signal

Troubleshooting

If you run into issues with pysqlcipher3 on Ubuntu/Linux (e.g. you get the error pysqlcipher3.dbapi2.DatabaseError: file is encrypted or is not a database) then do the following:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libsqlcipher-dev libssl-dev sqlcipher
git clone https://github.com/carderne/pysqlcipher3.git
pip uninstall pysqlcipher3
cd pysqlcipher3
python setup.py install

And then try the script again

./sigexport.py --overwrite exported

Still not working?

If you stil get issues, then we need to do manually decrypt the database. The following should work to get sqlcipher manually installed (from this StackOverflow answer):

sudo apt remove sqlcipher

Then clone sqlcipher and install it:

git clone https://github.com/sqlcipher/sqlcipher.git
cd sqlcipher
mkdir build && cd build
../configure --enable-tempstore=yes CFLAGS="-DSQLITE_HAS_CODEC" LDFLAGS="-lcrypto"
sudo make install

Then rerun the tool as follows. This will manually decrypt the database to a db-decrypted.sqlite file and use that to create the export (the decrypted database is deleted afterwards).

./sigexport.py --overwrite --manual exported

TODO