mrgnw / zulip_archive

A tool for archiving and displaying Zulip chat channels.

zulip_archive

A tool for publicly archiving and displaying Zulip chat channels.

Author: Robert Y. Lewis (@robertylewis)

The script archive.py has two functions:

• It builds a json archive of messages from a Zulip chat room.
• It generates static markdown/html to display these messages.

This is particularly useful when used in combination with Jekyll, to compile the html/markdown to a functional website. An example of this can be seen at the leanprover-community Zulip chat archive.

This script is provided as-is. Contributions to make it more robust or more general are very welcome.

Directions for use

• The script requires Python 3.

• Install the Zulip python bindings, with pip3 install zulip.

• Create a bot and download its zuliprc file to zulip_archive/zuliprc within this project.

• Extend the zuliprc file with an archive section like this:

  [archive]
  root_url=file:///home/tabbott/zulip_archive
  # A whitelist of streams; if specified, only these streams will be included.
  stream_whitelist=announce
  # A blacklist of streams; these streams will never be included.
  stream_blacklist=hidden, other hidden
  

• Optionally, modify the display generation code to fit your needs. The defaults are based on the leanprover-community Jekyll setup.

• Run python3 archive.py with the following options:

  • -t builds a fresh archive. This will download every message from the Zulip chat and might take a long time. Must be run at least once before using -i.
  • -i updates the archives with messages posted since the last scrape.
  • -b generates the markdown/html output.
  • -f updates the git repository containing the script, and -p pushes the generated files. Useful if the script is generating a static site hosted using GitHub Pages.