Mattermost Message Scraper - Export Chat History from Self-Hosted or Cloud

Export messages from any Mattermost workspace — both self-hosted instances and Mattermost Cloud. Connect with your instance URL and a personal access token to scrape teams, channels, and posts. Supports filtering by team name, channel name, date range, and direct messages. Returns 23 fields per message including team and channel context, author, message body (plain Markdown), reactions, and file attachment IDs.

post_message is stored as plain Markdown text, which makes it directly usable for Confluence or Notion imports, RAG pipeline ingestion, or knowledge base extraction without additional parsing.

What does the Mattermost scraper do?

It authenticates to the Mattermost REST API v4 using your personal access token, enumerates teams and channels accessible to that user, and paginates through posts in each channel. Usernames are resolved from a local cache to minimize API calls. The default API rate limit on self-hosted Mattermost is generous for authenticated users — typically 200+ requests per second.

What data does it extract?

Each record represents one Mattermost post:

Field	Type	Description
instance_url	string	Base URL of the Mattermost instance
team_id	string	Team UUID
team_name	string	Team URL slug
team_display_name	string	Team display name
channel_id	string	Channel UUID
channel_name	string	Channel URL slug
channel_display_name	string	Channel display name
channel_type	string	O=public, P=private, D=direct, G=group
channel_header	string	Channel header text
channel_purpose	string	Channel purpose text
post_id	string	Post UUID
post_root_id	string	Parent post UUID (empty for root posts, set for thread replies)
post_create_at	integer	Creation timestamp in milliseconds since Unix epoch
post_update_at	integer	Last update timestamp in ms
post_edit_at	integer	Last edit timestamp in ms (0 if never edited)
post_user_id	string	Author's user UUID
post_user_username	string	Author's username
post_message	string	Post body text (Markdown)
post_type	string	Empty for regular posts; system_* for system messages
post_hashtags	string	Space-separated hashtags
post_reactions	string	JSON array of emoji reactions [{emoji_name, user_id, create_at}]
post_file_ids	string	JSON array of file attachment IDs
post_props	string	JSON object with post metadata (attachments, overrides, etc.)

Sample output record

{
  "instance_url": "https://community.mattermost.com",
  "team_display_name": "Contributors",
  "channel_display_name": "Town Square",
  "channel_type": "O",
  "post_id": "3yd1q7gcrinbdmdq5qmnggd4xy",
  "post_root_id": "",
  "post_create_at": 1748063442000,
  "post_user_username": "john.doe",
  "post_message": "Has anyone seen the new API docs? The pagination endpoint changed.",
  "post_type": "",
  "post_reactions": "[{\"emoji_name\":\"thumbsup\",\"user_id\":\"abc123\",\"create_at\":1748063500000}]",
  "post_file_ids": "[]"
}

How to use it

Input	Required	Description
instanceUrl	Yes	Base URL of your Mattermost instance (e.g. https://mattermost.yourcompany.com). Works with self-hosted and Mattermost Cloud.
accessToken	Yes	Personal access token (see setup below)
teamNames	No	List of team URL slugs to scrape. Leave empty for all accessible teams.
channelNames	No	List of channel names to scrape within selected teams. Leave empty for all.
sinceDate	No	Only fetch posts on or after this date (ISO 8601)
untilDate	No	Only fetch posts on or before this date (ISO 8601)
includeDirectMessages	No	Set true to include DM and group message channels
maxItems	No	Maximum number of posts to return

Generating a personal access token

1. Log in to your Mattermost instance
2. Go to Account Settings → Security → Personal Access Tokens
3. Click Create Token, give it a description, and copy the token

The path may vary slightly between Mattermost versions and UI themes. Administrators can also generate tokens from the Admin Panel → Users panel for any user account.

Example input

{
  "instanceUrl": "https://mattermost.yourcompany.com",
  "accessToken": "your-personal-access-token",
  "teamNames": ["engineering"],
  "channelNames": ["general", "incidents"],
  "sinceDate": "2024-01-01",
  "maxItems": 5000
}

Use cases

• Compliance archival — export message history for legal hold or regulatory retention requirements in enterprise and government Mattermost deployments
• Platform migration — export messages to move to Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a custom data warehouse
• Knowledge base export — post_message is plain Markdown, so channel history exports directly to Confluence, Notion, or any RAG pipeline without additional parsing
• Incident retrospectives — extract incident channel history for post-mortems, filtered by date range
• Communication analytics — analyze team communication patterns, channel activity, and response times across channels

FAQ

Does this work with Mattermost Cloud? Yes. Set instanceUrl to your cloud workspace URL (e.g. https://yourteam.cloud.mattermost.com). The REST API v4 is identical between self-hosted and cloud.

What permissions does the token need? A standard personal access token with the authenticated user's default permissions is sufficient. The actor only reads data the token's user can access — private channels and DMs are included only if the user is a member.

How do I handle very large workspaces? Set maxItems to limit the run, then resume by setting sinceDate to the date of the last run. The actor pages through channels in batches of 200 posts per API request.

Output is available in JSON, CSV, and Excel via the Apify dataset export panel.