cheesecake-recipes

Programs to create chat backups for use with cheesecake

Cheesecake currently supports backups of three types - discord, matrix, and generic. generic is intended to be a general format you can use for most chat platforms. This repo includes an example of using generic to backup WhatsApp chats.

Discord

The script lets you backup whole servers, but it doesn't handle DMs. The backup includes a lot of stuff, including custom emoji and attachments. The resulting backup files can easily get very large on big servers, so don't include attachments if you're backing up an enormous server.

Environment variables

• GUILD: The server ID of the server you want to backup.
• TOKEN: The token of the bot account you're using to backup.

How to use

• Clone and open a terminal in the repo
• Optionally create and activate a virtual environment
• cd discord
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• Create .env file or specify environment variables in shell
• python discord-archive.py

Matrix

Backing up matrix involves running two scripts - the first one downloads the messages from the server, and the second one runs locally to convert the downloaded messages into a format compatible with cheesecake. The first script depends on python-olm, which can be difficult to install on windows. The second script, however, should work just fine on windows. So if you're on windows and you're unable to get the dependencies installed, you can run the first script on a unix-based system and copy the output files to windows, or you could run the second script on that system too. If you're running only the second script on windows, do pip install python-dotenv

The first script, matrix-archive.py, is from russelldavies/matrix-archive with some modifications. The output format is modified a bit and the output files should also be compatible with windows now (recommended even if you're on unix, so that you can share the backup).

How to use

• Clone and open a terminal in the repo
• Optionally create and activate a virtual environment
• cd matrix
• pip install -r requirements.txt (this might fail on windows, read above for workaround)
• python matrix-archive.py
• python matrix-convertor.py

WhatsApp

WhatsApp's export format lacks a lot of information, like user avatars, phone numbers, and replies. Because of this, the backup script will ask you for a lot of this information, but replies will only be saved like normal messages (you won't be able to see what message it is a reply to). You can easily add that information by editing the database, but that is obviously tedious and impractical when there are lots of replies.

By default the script asks for the data through stdin, but you can also create an info.json file inside the input directory so the script can run without requiring any interaction.

There are two global variables in the script, INPUT_PATH and OUTPUT_PATH. INPUT_PATH should have subdirectories for each of the chats you want to backup. Each subdirectory should have at least the exported txt file, and they can also have the attachments. The optional info.json should also be present directly inside INPUT_PATH.

OUTPUT_PATH is where the converted files will be saved. This directory can be renamed later, and must be copied to the refrigerator for cheesecake to use. It can also be shared with other people.

How to use

• Clone and open a terminal in the repo
• Optionally create and activate a virtual environment
• cd whatsapp
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• Copy the exported files to INPUT_PATH (whatsapp_exports by default)
• Optionally create an info.json file (details below)
• python whatsapp.py

info.json format

If you want to specify the chat metadata (avatar and description), create a chats key. If you want to specify the user metadata (phone no., avatar, and name color) create a users key. Data for the chats and users that are not present in the info.json file can be given through stdin.

Create a key with the name of the chat/user, and the value is an object with avatar and topic (description) for chats, and user_id (phone no.), avatar, and color (the color their name will be shown in) for users. All the values must be present, but you can use null if you want it empty. The avatar path is relative to INPUT_PATH (or you can use an absolute path).

Example info.json

{
    "chats": {
        "John Doe": {
            "avatar": "John Doe.jpg",
            "topic": null
        },
        "Class Reunion": {
            "avatar": "Class Reunion.jpg",
            "topic": "Discuss the upcoming class reunion."
        }
    },
    "users": {
        "John Doe": {
            "user_id": "14748183636",
            "avatar": "John Doe.jpg",
            "color": null
        },
        "Jane Doe": {
            "user_id": "16365459292",
            "avatar": "../default.svg",
            "color": "#ff0000"
        }
    }
}