Slack Channel Archiver

A simple tool to help archive public channels that haven't been used for a while.

Requirements

The following pre-requisites are required.

• Ruby 3.3.4
• Bundler

This has only been tested in *nix environment (e.g. MacOS/Linux) although there's nothing tying it to these platforms.

You'll also require bot and user API tokens from Slack. You can obtain new API tokens by creating a new App in Slack.

The bot token must have the following scopes:

• channels:history
• channels:manage
• channels:read

The user token must have the following scopes:

• channels:history
• channels:read
• channels:write

Configuration

API Tokens

The bot and user API tokens can be specified in three ways, in order of priority:

1. Pass it as the trailing arguments, e.g. bin/slack-channel-archiver 90 bot-api-token user-api-token
2. Set it as env var BOT_SLACK_API_TOKEN/USER_SLACK_API_TOKEN, e.g. BOT_SLACK_API_TOKEN=api-token USER_SLACK_API_TOKEN=another-token bin/slack-channel-archiver
3. Set in ~/.slack-channel-archiver, e.g.

bot-api-token: an-api-token
user-api-token: another-api-token

Configuration File

You can use the following configuration options in ~/.slack-channel-archiver:

Name	Type	Description
bot-api-token	string	Slack bot API token, as described above
user-api-token	string	Slack user API token, as described above
ignored-channel-names	list of strings	Names of channels that should never be archived, even if they match the archive criteria

For example:

bot-api-token: xoxb-a-bot-api-token
user-api-token: xoxp-a-user-api-token
ignored-channel-names:
- channel1
- channel2

Running

Usage:

bin/slack-channel-archiver [inactivity-period = 90 days] [bot-api-token] [user-api-token]

On the first run it'll install dependencies, which may be a bit noisy.

Due to rate limits on the Slack side it'll run quite slowly - about 1 channel/second will be tested. Also please note that channels will be marked as archived by the user who installed the app, as Slack doesn't allow bots to archive channels.

Support

Support is on a best-effort basis. We'll endeavour to keep it in a good state and to respond to any issues/requests, but it works nicely for our purposes and is unlikely to see any major feature enhancements.

Licencing

This code is licenced under an MIT licence as described in LICENSE.

Copyright © Springer Nature Ltd.