signal-export

Export chats from the Signal Desktop app to Markdown and HTML files with attachments. Each chat is exported as an individual .md/.html file and the attachments for each are stored in a separate folder. Attachments are linked from the Markdown files and displayed in the HTML (pictures, videos, voice notes).

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

Adapted from https://github.com/mattsta/signal-backup, which I suspect will be hard to get working now.

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.

This is converted to HTML at the end so it can be opened with any web browser. The stylesheet .css is still very basic but I'll get to it sooner or later.

Installation

There are issues with sqlcipher, and I haven't yet heard of anyone successfully using the original method (pipe up if you have!) so I'm going straight to the "advanced" method, which is more likely to work. Note that 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).

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

For Linux

Then to get sqlcipher working:

sudo apt install libsqlcipher-dev libssl-dev

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

For MacOS

• Install Homebrew.
• Run brew install openssl sqlcipher

Usage

Assuming you followed the instructions above, you need to use the --manual flag in the tool.

The following should work:

./sigexport.py --manual outputdir

The full options are below:

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

Options:
  -s, --source PATH  Path to Signal config and database
      --old PATH     Path to previous export to merge with
  -c, --chat "NAME"  Comma-separated chat names to include. These are contact names or group names
  -o, --overwrite    Flag to overwrite existing output
  -m, --manual       Flag to manually decrypt the database
  --help             Show this message and exit.

You can add --source /path/to/source/dir/ if the script doesn't manage to find the Signal config location. Default locations per OS are below. The directory should contain a folder called sql with a db.sqlite inside it.

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

You can also use --old /previously/exported/dir/ to merge the new export with a previous one. Nothing will be overwritten! It will put the combined results in whatever output directory you specified and leave your previos export untouched. Exercise is left to the reader to verify that all went well before deleting the previous one.

Original method

You can try running the script without --manual but I don't think it will work. You'll probably get an error like pysqlcipher3.dbapi2.DatabaseError: file is encrypted or is not a database