emm: Export Matrix Messages

A CLI tool that joins the room and exports last N messages to the file you specified.

Features

• Get messages from any matrix room with pagination (if limit greather than page, to prevent timeout errors) or without it (if limit less or equals page)
• Export messages to one file for all messages
• Export each message in separate file
• Custom templates supported (contrib contains an example of hugo post template, etke.cc/news can be used as reference)
• Delegation and aliases supported
• Anyone/world_readable access supported without invite

Usage

Full example

That's how etke.cc/news generated

# using event ID for filename
emm -hs hs.url -u user -p pass -r "#room:hs.url" -t contrib/hugo-post-template.md -o /tmp/%s.md
# using a custom slug for filename
emm -hs hs.url -u user -p pass -r "#room:hs.url" -t contrib/hugo-post-template.md -o /tmp/{{ .CreatedAtDate }}.md

NOTE: we at etke.cc do not spam customers with messages, attempting to be as less annoying as possible, so we send about 1-2 messages per week. If you are sending more than 1 message per day, the {{ .CreatedAtDate }} will not work as expected, because it will store only a single message per file. Instead, you can either use other template variables (see below), or use -a flag to append messages to the same file.

Documentation

Usage of emm:
  -a	Append to the output file. Useful when you are using multi output mode, but want to have multiple messages in a single file
  -hs string
    	Homeserver URL (supports delegation)
  -l int
    	Messages limit
  -o string
    	Output filename. If it contains %s, it will be replaced with event ID (one message per file, old way), or you can use Go template syntax to use all fields (new way)
  -p string
    	Password of the matrix user
  -r string
    	Room ID or alias
  -s string
    	Load messages since this timestamp. Format (RFC3339): YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ, e.g. 2023-10-01T00:00:00Z
  -t string
    	Template file. Default is JSON message struct
  -u string
    	Username/Login of the matrix user

Template syntax

You can modify the output file name using Go template syntax. The following fields are available:

• {{ .ID }} - event ID
• {{ .URLSafeID }} - event ID with URL-safe encoding
• {{ .Replace }} - old event ID that was replaced by this message
• {{ .ReplacedNote }} - a simple (updated) note if this message replaces another one
• {{ .Author }} - author's MXID
• {{ .Title }} - first line of the message with partially-stripped markdown
• {{ .Text }} - full message text (markdown plain-text)
• {{ .HTML }} - full message text (HTML, if available)
• {{ .CreatedAtDate }} - created at date in 2006-01-02 format (date only)
• {{ .CreatedAt }} - created at date in 2006-01-02 15:04:05 UTC format (date and time)
• {{ .CreatedAtFull }} - created at date in default Go's representation format

Using those vars you could have output files likes:

-o /tmp/{{ .CreatedAtDate }}-{{ .Title }}.md

All fields used in the output filename will be converted to URL-safe format, and the length of the filename will be truncated to 100 characters (to prevent filesystem errors).

How to get

• Arch Linux AUR
• Releases
• or go install github.com/etkecc/emm/cmd/emm@latest
• or just install from source code