Description

facebook-chat-downloader is an unofficial facebook chat messages downloader command line utility.
It’s designed to simplify the retrieval of the chat messages of a list of users.
It uses facebook-chat-api library to retrieve the data from facebook.

facebook-chat-downloader can login from an email and password from command line options, user prompt,
or from a state-file (generated if requested after the first successful login),
allowing to connect multiple times without requesting multiple times the email/password.

The file storage is done per chat name, usually the username, where the filename is the chat name with the symbols removed,
supporting the following file formats:

raw json - the data is stored as it’s retrieved from the facebook-chat-api.
formatted json - the output is processed, according to the supplied field names.
txt - a text file with one message per line.

Installation

[sudo] npm install -g facebook-chat-downloader

Usage

facebook-chat-downloader [options]

Where the options are:

Short Name	Long Name	Description
-e	—email	email if email and input state file aren’t present, it will request by user prompt
-p	—password	password if password and input state file aren’t present, it will request by user prompt
-s	—state-file	state filename if `-S` isn’t present, it will read state from this file replacing the need of an email and password
-S	—write-state-file	if present, it will write the state to this file after successful login
-t	—threads-file	chat threads filename if `-T` isn’t present, it will read threads from this file replacing the need of an extra request
-T	—write-threads-file	if present, it will write the threads file
-l	—limit	maximum number of chat threads use this value, only if the chats to download are recent
-g	—tag	list of chat types by tags Possible values are `INBOX`,`ARCHIVED`,`PENDING`,`OTHER`
-n	—chat-name	list of chat names to download
-R	—raw	if present and output is in raw `json`, otherwise is in formatted `json`
-O	—output-folder	output folder location where all the chat files will be stored
-N	—output-field-name	list of fields names for non-raw storage Possible values are: `date`, `sender`, `message`
-F	—output-file-format	output file format. Either `txt` or `json`
-D	—output-date-format	output date-time format. see moment.js
-c	—convert	converts from raw chat file into another format If it’s present, it will bypass login, and it will read from previously stored raw json files

Examples

facebook-chat-downloader -n 'My lunch group' -n 'Miss 王' -R

It will prompt for the email and password associated with your facebook account,
and store the chats in the files: my-lunch-group.raw.json and miss-王.raw.json.

facebook-chat-downloader -e myfbemail@northpole.com -s state.json -S -O chats

It will prompt for the password, store the state in state.json after successful login,
and store all the chats in the folder chats in json format.

facebook-chat-downloader -s state.json -t threads.json -T -n 'Hiking (weekend)' -F txt

It will read the login from state.json, write the thead list in threads.json,
download one chat and store it in text format on the file hiking-weekend.txt.

facebook-chat-downloader -t threads.json -c -n 'My lunch group' -F txt -N date -N message -N sender

It will read the previously stored my-lunch-group.raw.json and convert it into text format,
with the message before the sender.

Caveats

To prevent connection timeouts, facebook-chat-downloader downloads a 50 messages package,
and then it uses a recursive function to retrieve the next one package.
If a certain chat has too many messages, it could reach a stack overflow.

License

MIT