Slack clean all messages 8K in a channel

Question

We currently have a Slack channel with  8K messages all comes from Jenkins integration  Is there any programmatic way to delete all messages from that channel  The web interface can only delete 100 messages at a time

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UPDATE    as  niels-van-reijmersdal metioned in comment      This feature has been removed  See this thread for more info  twitter com slackhq status 467182697979588608 lang en     END UPDATE    Here is a nice answer from SlackHQ in twitter  and it works without any third party stuff  https   twitter com slackhq status 467182697979588608 lang en     You can bulk delete via the archives  http   my slack com archives      page for a particular channel  look for  delete messages  in menu

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Tip  if you gonna use the slack cleaner https   github com kfei slack-cleaner  You will need to generate a token  https   api slack com custom-integrations legacy-tokens

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Option 1 You can set a Slack channel to automatically delete messages after 1 day  but it s a little hidden  First  you have to go to your Slack Workspace Settings  Message Retention  amp  Deletion  and check  Let workspace members override these settings   After that  in the Slack client you can open a channel  click the gear  and click  Edit message retention      Option 2 The slack-cleaner command line tool that others have mentioned   Option 3 Below is a little Python script that I use to clear Private channels  Can be a good starting point if you want more programmatic control of deletion  Unfortunately Slack has no bulk-delete API  and they rate-limit the individual delete to 50 per minute  so it unavoidably takes a long time     - - coding  utf-8 - -     Requirement  pip install slackclient     import multiprocessing dummy  ctypes  time  traceback  datetime from slackclient import SlackClient legacy token   raw input  Enter token of an admin user  Get it from https   api slack com custom-integrations legacy-tokens  gt  gt     slack client   SlackClient legacy token    name to id   dict   res   slack client api call     groups list     groups are private channels  conversations are public channels  Different API    exclude members True       print   Private channels    for c in res  groups        print c  name        name to id c  name      c  id    channel   raw input  Enter channel name to clear  gt  gt     strip      channel id   name to id channel   pool multiprocessing dummy Pool 4   slack rate-limits the API  so not much benefit to more threads  count   multiprocessing dummy Value ctypes c int 0  def  delete message message       try          success   False         while not success              res  slack client api call                     chat delete                     channel channel id                    ts message  ts                                 success   res  ok               if not success                  if res get  error     ratelimited                        print res                     time sleep float res  headers    Retry-After                     else                      raise Exception  got error   s   str res get  error              count value    1         if count value   50  0              print count value      except          traceback print exc    retries   3 hours in past   int raw input  How many hours in the past should messages be kept  Enter 0 to delete them all   gt  gt      latest timestamp     datetime datetime utcnow  -datetime timedelta hours hours in past   - datetime datetime 1970 1 1   total seconds   print  deleting messages      while retries  gt  0       see https   api slack com methods conversations history     res   slack client api call         groups history         channel channel id        count 1000        latest latest timestamp   important to do paging  Otherwise Slack returns a lot of already-deleted messages      if res  messages            latest timestamp   min float m  ts    for m in res  messages        print datetime datetime utcfromtimestamp float latest timestamp   strftime   r  d- b- Y        pool map  delete message  res  messages        if not res  has more     Slack API seems to lie about this sometimes         print   No data  Sleeping              time sleep 1 0          retries -  1     else          retries 10  print  Done      Note  that script will need modification to list  amp  clear public channels  The API methods for those are channels   instead of groups

User · Answer

I wrote a simple node script for deleting messages from public private channels and chats  You can modify and use it  https   gist github com firatkucuk ee898bc919021da621689f5e47e7abac First  modify your token in the scripts configuration section then run the script  node   delete-slack-messages CHANNEL ID  Get an OAuth token   Go to https   api slack com apps Click  Create New App   and name your  temporary  app  In the side nav  go to  Oauth  amp  Permissions  On that page  find the  Scopes  section  Click  Add an OAuth Scope  and add  channels history  and  chat write    see scopes  At the top of the page  Click  Install App to Workspace   Confirm  and on page reload  copy the OAuth Access Token   Find the channel ID Also  the channel ID can be seen in the browser URL when you open slack in the browser  e g  https   mycompany slack com messages MY CHANNEL ID   or https   app slack com client WORKSPACE ID MY CHANNEL ID

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Here is a great chrome extension to bulk delete your slack channel group im messages - https   slackext com deleter   where you can filter the messages by star  time range  or users  BTW  it also supports load all messages in recent version  then you can load your  8k messages as you need

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If you like Python and have obtained a legacy API token from the slack api  you can delete all private messages you sent to a user with the following   import requests import sys import time from json import loads    config - replace the bit between quotes with your  token  token    xoxp-854385385283-5438342854238520-513620305190-505dbc3e1c83b6729e198b52f128ad69     replace  Carl  with name of the person you were messaging dm name    Carl     helper methods api    https   slack com api   suffix    token  0  amp pretty 1  format token   def fetch route  args           Make a GET request for data at  url  and return formatted JSON      url   api   route         suffix     amp     args   return loads requests get url  text     find the user whose dm messages should be removed target user    i for i in fetch  users list    members   if dm name in i  real name    if not target user    print     your target user could not be found     sys exit      find the channel with messages to the target user channel    i for i in fetch  im list    ims   if i  user      target user 0   id    if not channel    print     your target channel could not be found     sys exit      fetch and delete all messages print     querying for channel   channel 0   id     with target user   target user 0   id    args    channel     channel 0   id       amp limit 100  result   fetch  conversations history   args args  messages   result  messages   print     has more    result  has more    result get  response metadata       get  next cursor        while result  has more      cursor   result  response metadata    next cursor     result   fetch  conversations history   args args     amp cursor     cursor    messages    result  messages     print     next page has more    result  has more     for idx  i in enumerate messages       tier 3 method rate limit  https   api slack com methods chat delete     all rate limits  https   api slack com docs rate-limits tiers   time sleep 1 05    result   fetch  chat delete   args  channel  0  amp ts  1   format channel 0   id    i  ts       print     deleted   idx 1   of   len messages    messages   i  text      if result get  error           ratelimited       print   n   sorry there have been too many requests  Please wait a little bit and try again        sys exit

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As other answers allude  Slack s rate limits make this tricky - the rate limit is relatively low for their chat delete API at  50 requests per minute  The best strategy that respects the rate limit is to retrieve messages from the channel you want to clear  then delete the messages in batches under 50 that run on a minutely interval  I ve built a project containing an example of this batching that you can easily fork and deploy on Autocode - it lets you clear a channel via slash command  and allows you restrict access to the command to just certain users of course    When you run  cmd clear in a channel  it marks that channel for clearing and runs the following code every minute until it deletes all the messages in the channel  console log  About to clear   messages length  messages from    channel name         let deletionResults   await async mapLimit messages  2  async  message    gt      try       await lib slack messages   0 6 1   destroy         id  clearedChannelId        ts  message ts        as user  true             return         successful  true            catch  e        return         successful  false        retryable  e message  amp  amp  e message indexOf  ratelimited       -1                 You can view the full code and a guide to deploying your own version here  https   autocode com src jacoblee slack-clear-messages

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There is a slack tool to delete all slack messages on your workspace  Check it out  https   www messagebender com

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For anyone else who doesn t need to do it programmatic  here s a quick way    probably for paid users only    Open the channel in web or the desktop app  and click the cog  top right   Choose  Additional options     to bring up the archival menu  notes Select  Set the channel message retention policy   Set  Retain all messages for a specific number of days   All messages older than this time are deleted permanently    I usually set this option to  1 day  to leave the channel with some context  then I go back into the above settings  and set it s retention policy back to  default  to go continue storing them from now-on   Notes  Luke points out  If the option is hidden  you have to go to global workspace Admin settings  Message Retention  amp  Deletion  and check  Let workspace members override these settings

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default clean command did not work for me giving following error     slack-cleaner --token  lt TOKEN gt  --message --channel  lt CHANNEL gt   Running slack-cleaner v0 2 4 Channel  direct message or private group not found   but following worked without any issue to clean the bot messages  slack-cleaner --token  lt TOKEN gt  --message --group  lt CHANNEL gt  --bot --perform --rate 1    or  slack-cleaner --token  lt TOKEN gt  --message --group  lt CHANNEL gt  --user     --perform --rate 1    to clean all the messages   I use rate-limit of 1 second to avoid HTTP 429 Too Many Requests error because of slack api rate limit  In both cases  channel name was supplied without   sign

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I quickly found out there s someone already made a helper  slack-cleaner for this   And for me it s just    slack-cleaner --token  lt TOKEN gt  --message --channel jenkins --user     --perform

[slack-api] Slack clean all messages (~8K) in a channel

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