nowsci/message-archive repository overview

⁠message-archive

A web-based message archive viewer for Signal, Google Voice, and Hangouts.

⁠Install

The best way to install is to use the docker image from the Docker Hub (https://hub.docker.com/r/nowsci/message-archive/⁠).

docker pull nowsci/message-archive

With the following docker compose:

version: '2.1'

services:

  message-archive:
    image: nowsci/message-archive
    container_name: message-archive
    environment:
      - SIGNAL_PASS=AAAAA BBBBB CCCCC DDDDD EEEEE FFFFF
      - MY_NUMBER=12223334444
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - ./message-archive/data:/data
    ports:
      - 80:80
    restart: always

Next, start the container:

docker-compose up -d message-archive

If you visit the site, you're going to get an error until you run your import. So first, run:

docker exec -ti message-archive import

This will:

• Set up the folder structure
• Create a blank database
• Secure the site with username admin and password password via ./message-archive/data/htpasswd

You will notice a folder exists now called ./message-archive/data/backups/watch. Place your Signal .backup files and Google Takeout .zip files there. Takeout backups for Google Voice and Hangouts can be generated at https://takeout.google.com/⁠. Then run the import again:

docker exec -ti message-archive import

Now your messages will display! You can add any files to the watch folder and run the import again at any point and it will merge in new messages, ignoring existing ones even if they were in a previous archive file.

⁠Manual install

While docker is the preferred way to run message-archive, you can run it manually if you prefer. You will need a PHP/Apache setup for the files in html and you will need to point the database location in the php files to the right file. You will also need:

• Signal-back from https://github.com/xeals/signal-back⁠
• unzip
• python3

After that, to run imports you can use message-archive.py:

usage: message-archive.py [-h] [-p SIGNAL_PASS] [-s SIGNAL_BACK] -m MY_NUMBER -d DATA_DIR

Import Signal and Google Voice backups into Sqlite3.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help                                 show this help message and exit
  -p SIGNAL_PASS, --signal-pass SIGNAL_PASS  Password for signal backup
  -s SIGNAL_BACK, --signal-back SIGNAL_BACK  Path to signal-back

required arguments:
  -m MY_NUMBER, --my-number MY_NUMBER        Your phone number. Format: "12223334444"
  -d DATA_DIR, --data-dir DATA_DIR           The data directory