Slack clean all messages (~8K) in a channel

Question

We currently have a Slack channel with ~8K messages all comes from Jenkins integration. Is there any programmatic way to delete all messages from that channel? The web interface

Answer 1

If you like Python and have obtained a legacy API token from the slack api, you can delete all private messages you sent to a user with the following:

import requests
import sys
import time
from json import loads

# config - replace the bit between quotes with your "token"
token = 'xoxp-854385385283-5438342854238520-513620305190-505dbc3e1c83b6729e198b52f128ad69'

# replace 'Carl' with name of the person you were messaging
dm_name = 'Carl'

# helper methods
api = 'https://slack.com/api/'
suffix = 'token={0}&pretty=1'.format(token)

def fetch(route, args=''):
  '''Make a GET request for data at `url` and return formatted JSON'''
  url = api + route + '?' + suffix + '&' + args
  return loads(requests.get(url).text)

# find the user whose dm messages should be removed
target_user = [i for i in fetch('users.list')['members'] if dm_name in i['real_name']]
if not target_user:
  print(' ! your target user could not be found')
  sys.exit()

# find the channel with messages to the target user
channel = [i for i in fetch('im.list')['ims'] if i['user'] == target_user[0]['id']]
if not channel:
  print(' ! your target channel could not be found')
  sys.exit()

# fetch and delete all messages
print(' * querying for channel', channel[0]['id'], 'with target user', target_user[0]['id'])
args = 'channel=' + channel[0]['id'] + '&limit=100'
result = fetch('conversations.history', args=args)
messages = result['messages']
print(' * has more:', result['has_more'], result.get('response_metadata', {}).get('next_cursor', ''))
while result['has_more']:
  cursor = result['response_metadata']['next_cursor']
  result = fetch('conversations.history', args=args + '&cursor=' + cursor)
  messages += result['messages']
  print(' * next page has more:', result['has_more'])

for idx, i in enumerate(messages):
  # tier 3 method rate limit: https://api.slack.com/methods/chat.delete
  # all rate limits: https://api.slack.com/docs/rate-limits#tiers
  time.sleep(1.05)
  result = fetch('chat.delete', args='channel={0}&ts={1}'.format(channel[0]['id'], i['ts']))
  print(' * deleted', idx+1, 'of', len(messages), 'messages', i['text'])
  if result.get('error', '') == 'ratelimited':
    print('\n ! sorry there have been too many requests. Please wait a little bit and try again.')
    sys.exit()