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Rocket.Chat Message Scraper - Export Chat History via REST API

Export messages, channels, private groups, and direct messages from any Rocket.Chat instance using the official REST API. Works with Rocket.Chat Community Edition, Enterprise Edition, and cloud-hosted workspaces. Authenticate with a User ID and personal access token, then filter by room type, date range, or specific room IDs.

What does the Rocket.Chat scraper do?

It connects to the Rocket.Chat REST API, enumerates rooms accessible to the authenticated user (channels, private groups, and optionally direct messages), and paginates through message history at 100 messages per request. Thread replies can be enabled with an extra API call per thread. Usernames and display names are resolved per message.

For very large workspaces, use maxItems to limit run size and re-run with dateFrom set to the previous run's cutoff to process incrementally.

Typical throughput on a self-hosted instance depends on that instance's rate limit configuration. The API pages at 100 messages per request, so a workspace with 100,000 messages requires approximately 1,000 API calls.

What data does it extract?

Each record represents one Rocket.Chat message:

Sample output record

{
"instance_url":"https://open.rocket.chat",
"room_name":"general",
"room_type":"c",
"message_id":"abc123xyz",
"message_ts":"2024-06-01T09:14:22.000Z",
"message_user_username":"jane.smith",
"message_user_name":"Jane Smith",
"message_msg":"Here's the updated runbook for the deploy process.",
"message_type":"",
"message_reactions":"{\":thumbsup:\":{\"usernames\":[\"john.doe\"],\"names\":[\"John Doe\"]}}",
"message_attachments":"[]",
"message_urls":"[]"
}

How to use it

Generating a personal access token

1. Log in to your Rocket.Chat instance
2. Click your avatar, then select Profile
3. Scroll to Personal Access Tokens and click Add
4. Copy both the Token and your User ID shown above the token list

The token path may vary between Rocket.Chat Community and Enterprise UI versions. Administrators can also generate tokens from Admin Panel → Users for any account.

Input parameters

Example input

{
"instanceUrl":"https://chat.yourcompany.com",
"userId":"your-user-id",
"authToken":"your-access-token",
"roomTypes":["c","p"],
"dateFrom":"2024-01-01",
"maxItems":10000
}

Use cases

• Compliance archival — export message history for legal or regulatory retention from enterprise self-hosted deployments
• Platform migration — extract messages before moving to Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a custom data warehouse
• Knowledge base extraction — mine channel history for documentation; message_msg is plain text ready for import into Confluence, Notion, or a RAG pipeline
• Communication analytics — analyze message volume, response times, and topic trends across channels and time windows
• Backup — create offline snapshots of workspace history before a major upgrade or infrastructure change

FAQ

Does this work with cloud-hosted Rocket.Chat? Yes. Set instanceUrl to your cloud workspace URL. The REST API is identical across hosting models.

What rooms can the actor access? Only rooms visible to the authenticated user. Public channels, private groups the user belongs to, and (if enabled) direct messages. Admin accounts can access more rooms than regular users.

How do I handle authentication errors? Authentication failures produce an error record with status: AUTH_ERROR. Verify that the User ID and token are from the same Rocket.Chat instance and that personal access tokens are enabled by your admin.

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