thpeetz-notes/Quellen/IT/Delete old messages in Mattermost.md

title, source, tags

title	source	tags
README.md · master · InstitutMaupertuis	https://gitlab.com/InstitutMaupertuis/mattermost-old-messages/blob/master/README.md	IT/Tools/Gitlab IT/Tools/Mattermost

This guide will help you delete old messages and attachments from your Mattermost Open Source edition server.

This procedure is very similar to what the data retention option of Mattermost Enterprise Edition E20 does.

⚠ Run this at your own risk! I strongly suggest making a backup of your Mattermost directories and MySQL database before running these commands ⚠

This will be the limit date for the messages to keep (messages before this date will be deleted). Use https://www.epochconverter.com/ or Unix commands to generate the timestamp for your date.

• For example: 1527811200 corresponds to the first of june 2018.
• In Mattermost database timestamps are stored with sub seconds accuracy so you need to multiply this timestamp by 1000 for later use.

In this example we will use 1527811200000, tweak the commands with your own timestamp.

List old messages / attachments

Open the MySQL prompt on your server and issue these queries

USE mattermost;
SELECT * FROM FileInfo WHERE CreateAt < 1527811200000 LIMIT 10;
SELECT * FROM Posts WHERE CreateAt < 1527811200000 LIMIT 10;

You should see information about the files / messages, this only lists 10 results.

If you get an empty set make sure you have the right timestamp (multiplied by 1000)

Delete old messages / attachments

MySQL configuration

Edit /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf and add at the end

secure_file_priv=""

Restart MySQL

sudo service mysql restart

This will allow us to dump the results of a query into a file on the disk.

Get a list of the attachments

• Tweak the user and password corresponding to your credentials.

• This will create a temporary directory with a file inside containing the path of each attachment that is to be removed

  #!/bin/bash sudo mkdir /tmp/mysqldump/ sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /tmp/mysqldump/ sudo rm /tmp/mysqldump/* mysql -u user -p'password' -D mattermost -e "SELECT Path FROM FileInfo
  WHERE CreateAt < 1527811200000
  INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/mysqldump/uploaded_files.txt'
  FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
  ENCLOSED BY ''
  LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';"

Script to delete the attachments

Create an executable script with the following content, tweak the /opt/mattermost/data with your installation directory of Mattermost.

#!/bin/bash
input="/tmp/mysqldump/uploaded_files.txt"
while IFS= read -r line
do
  rm "/opt/mattermost/data/$line"
done < "$input"

Run this script as root to delete the attachments files.

You can now delete the list of files

sudo rm -Rf /tmp/mysqldump/

Delete the database entries

This will delete all the messages/attachments in the database

mysql -u user -p'password' -D mattermost -e "DELETE FROM FileInfo WHERE CreateAt < 1527811200000;"
mysql -u user -p'password' -D mattermost -e "DELETE FROM Posts WHERE CreateAt < 1527811200000;"

Configuration MySQL

We can now revert the MySQL configuration at /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf, comment

#secure_file_priv=""

Restart MySQL

sudo service mysql restart