keybase-export  

A tool to export Keybase chats.

Features

• Configuration file
• Export to jsonl (json lines)
• Export to SQLite
• Watcher for new messages
• Attachment downloading
• Incremental export

Requirements

• Node.js (around version 18 or newer)

Installation

keybase-export can be installed via npm:

$ npm install --global keybase-export

It is also possible to launch it as npx keybase-export without installation.

Alternatively, the latest possible version can be obtained by cloning the repository and running npm install.

Usage

$ keybase-export [<options>] [<config>]

The configuration of keybase-export is pretty barebones: it reads everything it needs from a json file, that can be specified as a command line argument, or defaults to the config.json file in the current working directory. See the config.example.json file for a config example and config.ts for the config schema.

keybase-export --init <filename> copies the config example to <filename>. Afterwards, you should edit it. At the very least, the chats, username, and paperkey fields should be replaced. That is, for this to work, you should generate a paper key and paste it into the config. (There is an alternative initFromRunningService method that uses the running instance of keybase, but it is not as stable.)

To enable debug logs, set the DEBUG env variable to keybase-export*.

The incremental mode feature is a bit experimental.

Troubleshooting

• Path can't be longer than 108 characters (failed to chdir)

On macOS, this error can occur during attachment downloading due to way too long $TMPDIR. As a workaround, just set the TMPDIR env variable to something shorter.