ChatGPT Exporter Ultimate

One of dozens of skills and plugins in TinkerClaw — a self-improving OpenClaw fork that's been running 24/7 for months.

Your entire ChatGPT history, exported in seconds — not tomorrow.

Deleting your exports — --purge

An export is a plaintext copy of every conversation you have had. Leaving it on disk is usually a bigger risk than the API call that created it, so cleanup is a first-class command rather than an rm -rf you are trusted to type correctly:

./scripts/export.sh --purge -o ~/.local/share/chatgpt-export/2026-01-31
./scripts/export.sh --purge-expired    # everything past the expiry in its own manifest

This is destructive, so the target is validated rather than trusted. The directory that gets deleted is the exact one you named — no parent is ever derived from it — and it is deleted only if all of the following hold:

• it canonicalizes with realpath (so every symlinked component is resolved first);
• the canonical path is a strict descendant of your canonical $HOME, at least two levels deep — $HOME itself, /, and anything one level down are refused outright;
• it contains a .chatgpt-export-manifest.json that this tool wrote. An arbitrary folder that happens to hold an index.json is not accepted as proof of ownership;
• you typed PURGE at the prompt, in an interactive terminal. It refuses to run headless;
• and the whole check is repeated immediately before the delete, so a directory swapped in after validation is still rejected.

It removes local copies only — your ChatGPT account is untouched. These rules are not a promise in a README; they are covered by scripts/purge-selftest.sh, which runs the refusals against a throwaway $HOME and never touches your real one.

What You Get

• Your conversation list. The relay walks the conversations ChatGPT lists for you; the bookmarklet also finds ones inside Projects. Timestamps, roles and metadata come along; message text only if you ask.
• Instant. No 24-hour wait. No email with a ZIP of cryptic JSON. Just your data, now.
• Context preserved. Conversations stay readable. Who said what, when, and why — all intact.

How It Works

Install the skill, ask for it by name, confirm the destination and scope, and the export is written.

ChatGPT's built-in export makes you wait a day and hands you raw JSON. This skill respects your time.

Won't: email you a ZIP file 24 hours later like you requested declassified government documents.

👉 Explore the full project: github.com/globalcaos/clawdbot-moltbot-openclaw

Clone it. Fork it. Break it. Make it yours.

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⚠️ Read This Before Your First Export

An export is a plaintext copy of everything you have ever said to ChatGPT, sitting on your disk. Whatever you pasted into a chat is in there: API keys, passwords, medical questions, legal problems, salary numbers, your employer's confidential material, other people's personal data.

Once written, those files are ordinary files. Anything running as your user can read them, your backup tool will pick them up, and a sync client will happily push them to a cloud you did not think about. So:

• Export to a local, non-synced directory. Not Dropbox, not Drive, not iCloud, not a repo. You do not have to remember this: the default is a dedicated private directory (~/.local/share/chatgpt-export/<date>), and a destination that looks synced, sits inside a git repo, or leaves your home directory is refused — with no override. The check resolves symlinks first, so a link named exports that points into Dropbox is judged on where it actually goes.
• The relay creates the directory mode 0700 and files 0600. Don't loosen that. (The bookmarklet's download lands wherever your browser saves files, with your browser's permissions.)
• Delete the export when you are done with it — ./scripts/export.sh --purge -o <dir>. Every relay export records an expiry (30 days by default); --purge-expired clears the ones past it. A bookmarklet download has no manifest: delete that file yourself.
• If you only need to know what you talked about, use index-only mode: titles, ids and timestamps, with no message content fetched at all.
• Never hand a raw export to anyone, including another AI, without reading it first.

This skill will not export anything until you say yes, and it tells you what it is about to do before it asks.

Permissions, Data Flow & Consent

Short version: your conversations travel from chatgpt.com to your disk, and nowhere else. There is no server of ours in this picture. Longer version, because you should not take that on trust:

Where the data goes. Each export path fetches from chatgpt.com/backend-api and writes files locally. There is no upload, no telemetry, no analytics, no third-party endpoint of any kind. The only network destination in the entire package is chatgpt.com.

What gets written, and where.

Path	Default output	Files
scripts/export-conversations.ts (relay)	~/.local/share/chatgpt-export/<date>	.chatgpt-export-manifest.json, index.json; unless index-only also summary.md and per-conversation .json + .md
scripts/export.sh	—	writes nothing (vets destinations and purges)
scripts/bookmarklet.js (browser)	your browser's Downloads folder	one chatgpt-export-<date>.json

Directories are 0700 and files 0600 — enforced on every run, not only when they are first created, so reusing an export directory that is already world-readable cannot leave your conversations exposed. You can choose the destination, but one that looks synced (Dropbox, Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, Nextcloud…), sits inside a git repository, or resolves outside your home directory is refused, with no override.

The check runs on the resolved path, not the one you typed: ~/exports that is a symlink to ~/Dropbox/exports is refused. The destination is canonicalized through every symlinked component — including ancestors that exist while the export directory does not yet — before anything is written, and re-verified after the directory is created. Inside it, nothing follows a link: each file is opened with O_NOFOLLOW and chmod-ed through its descriptor, and conversations/ must be a real directory at exactly that path. A reused export directory holding a symlinked index.json, summary.md, manifest, conversations/ or conversation file is refused and the link target is not touched. The directory is re-checked after each file is opened; on Linux the open descriptor's real path (/proc/self/fd) must match as well, so a directory swapped for a link in the instant before the open — even if it is swapped back — aborts the export and the empty file is removed. Without /proc (macOS) the swap-and-swap-back case by another process running as you is not detected; that is the limit of what Node's file API allows. outputDir must be absolute or start with ~/. The default is a dedicated private directory rather than the top of $HOME, because that is where sync clients look.

./scripts/export.sh --check-dest <dir> vets a destination and prints what it resolves to, without writing anything.

Every relay export drops a .chatgpt-export-manifest.json marker recording when it was written and when it expires. That marker is what makes the export deletable by --purge, and nothing without it will be deleted. The bookmarklet writes no manifest, so --purge cannot touch its download.

How it authenticates — and the honest part. ChatGPT has no public API for reading your own conversation history. The only way to do this is to talk to the same private endpoints the web app uses, as you. That is the skill's core mechanism, and there is no version of it that avoids touching your session. What we can do is minimise it, and we do:

• Relay path — runs inside the page with credentials: 'include'. Reads no token at all.
• Bookmarklet — cookie only. If the cookie is rejected it tells you to log in again and stops.
• Shell path — scripts/export.sh does not export at all. It makes no network call and handles no credential; it is the cleanup half (--purge, --purge-expired, --check-dest).

No bearer token, anywhere. Nothing in this package reads, stores, forwards or replays one; scripts/dest-safety-selftest.sh fails if any script regains the ability. The cost is headless export — there is no unattended path. If you need one, use ChatGPT's own 24-hour export.

Capabilities, and why each one is needed.

Capability	Why	Scope
Network	List and fetch your conversations	chatgpt.com/backend-api only. No other host, ever
Browser session (cookie)	Authenticate as you — there is no other way in	Same-origin, inside the page; not copied out
Session token	None. No path reads, stores or replays one (removed in 1.9.1)	—
File write	The export itself	The output directory. 0700 dir, 0600 files, re-applied on every run. Destinations that resolve to synced/git/outside-$HOME are refused, no override
File delete	--purge / --purge-expired, so an export is not left lying around forever	The exact validated directory only: canonical, under $HOME, two levels deep, carrying our manifest, typed confirmation, interactive only
Shell exec	export.sh runs realpath/readlink, grep, sed and coreutils for path validation and purging	Fixed binaries, fixed arguments. No network binaries
Search endpoint	Find conversations inside Projects, which the list endpoint omits	~65 short queries against your own history. Opt-in, skippable
Credentials on disk	None. Reads no keyring, no .env, no config, no cookie jar	—
Third-party services	None. No telemetry, no upload, no analytics	—
Privilege escalation	None. No sudo. The relay writes only inside its output directory; the bookmarklet only hands one file to the browser's download	—

The consent step — each export path has one, in code.

• export.sh no longer exports, so it has no export consent step. Its destructive path does: --purge validates the target, refuses to run non-interactively, and requires you to type PURGE.
• bookmarklet.js opens a dialog stating that the file may contain credentials and other sensitive material. Cancel and nothing happens. Two further dialogs let you skip the Projects search and drop message bodies.
• exportChatGPTConversations() throws unless the caller passes confirmed: true, and the thrown message is the structured confirmation itself — destination, scope, cap, redaction, network and sensitivity — so the agent shows you the terms rather than paraphrasing them. An agent has to ask you first; installing this skill cannot turn into an unattended dump of your chat history.

The off switch. The relay and export.sh check this before any network call or file write:

CHATGPT_EXPORT_DISABLE=1                       # disable for one command or one shell
touch ~/.openclaw/chatgpt-export.disabled      # disable permanently, machine-wide
rm ~/.openclaw/chatgpt-export.disabled         # allow again

With either in place, export.sh prints a notice and exits 0, and the TypeScript path throws. Neither fetches anything. In the browser, the off switch is cancelling the first dialog.

Scope controls. Full export is a choice, not the default behaviour you get by accident:

Control	relay (.ts)	bookmarklet
Must be asked for by name	confirmed: true (else it throws)	the first dialog
Cap how many	limit: N	—
No message bodies (DEFAULT)	indexOnly: true	Cancel the third dialog
Scrub common secrets	redact: true — applies to every file, summary.md included	—
Skip Projects search	n/a (never searches)	Cancel the second dialog
Choose destination	outputDir	browser Downloads
Refuse a risky destination	always on, no override	n/a
Set the expiry	expireDays: N (default 30)	n/a
Delete it again	via export.sh --purge	delete the download

export.sh is absent from this table because it no longer exports — it has no scope to control. There is no unattended export path at all: the relay needs a caller that has confirmed with you, and the bookmarklet needs you in the browser clicking through its dialogs. Deletion always asks, every time.

Usage

1. Browser relay (recommended — no token is ever read)

Prerequisites: Node 22.6+ (which runs the .ts file directly) or Node with tsx, an OpenClaw browser relay attached to a Chrome/Chromium where you are logged into chatgpt.com.

Invoke it by name, so ordinary conversation about ChatGPT cannot start an export: "chatgpt-exporter-ultimate: export my conversations." The agent must then echo the destination, the scope (index-only or full) and the sensitivity warning back to you, and get a yes, before calling:

await exportChatGPTConversations({
  browserEvaluate,           // supplied by the agent's browser tool
  confirmed: true,           // only after the user has actually agreed
  outputDir: "~/.local/share/chatgpt-export/2026-01-31",  // this is also the default
  format: "both",            // "json" | "md" | "both"
  limit: 50,                 // optional cap
  indexOnly: false,          // true = titles/timestamps only, no message text (DEFAULT is true)
  redact: true,              // best-effort scrub of common secret formats
});

Without confirmed: true it throws — and the error it throws is the confirmation script itself: destination, scope, cap, redaction state and the sensitivity warning, so the agent has something exact to show you rather than a summary of its own. It also refuses — unconditionally, with no override — a destination that resolves to something synced, inside a git repo, or outside your home directory, and re-checks after creating the directory. Exports written here carry the same ownership marker, so export.sh --purge can clean them up.

2. Bookmarklet (browser only, includes Projects)

Prerequisites: Chrome DevTools, logged into chatgpt.com.

Open the console on chatgpt.com, paste scripts/bookmarklet.js, press Enter, and answer the three dialogs: export or not, search Projects or not, include message text or not. The result lands in your Downloads folder as a single JSON file. This is the only path that finds conversations inside Projects, and it does so by running ~65 short searches against your own history — that is the trade, and the dialog says so before it starts.

3. Shell script (cleanup and destination vetting — does NOT export)

Prerequisites: bash and coreutils. No network, no credential.

./scripts/export.sh --check-dest ~/private/chatgpt   # vet a destination, write nothing
./scripts/export.sh --purge -o ~/private/chatgpt     # validated delete, asks you to type PURGE
./scripts/export.sh --purge-expired                  # delete every export past its expiry

This script does not export and handles no credential. The relay drops an ownership manifest into every export it writes; --purge validates that manifest and deletes the export later, and --check-dest vets a destination before you point the relay somewhere new. The bookmarklet writes no manifest — its single download is yours to delete.

Included Files

File	Purpose
scripts/export-conversations.ts	Browser-relay exporter. Consent-gated, off-switchable, no token read
scripts/bookmarklet.js	Console/bookmarklet exporter. Three consent dialogs, cookie-only auth, finds Projects
scripts/export.sh	Cleanup and destination vetting. No network, no credential. Off switch, validated --purge, --check-dest
scripts/purge-selftest.sh	Regression tests for --purge (14): runs its refusals against a throwaway $HOME, no network
scripts/dest-safety-selftest.sh	Regression tests for destination vetting (19): symlink bypasses, and that the removed overrides stay removed
scripts/relay-selftest.ts	Regression tests for the relay (53): file modes on reused paths, summary redaction, planted nested symlinks and hard links, a directory swapped between validation and write, no-token guarantee. Stubbed browser, no network

That is the whole package — six scripts, no binaries, no installers, nothing that runs on its own. Everything the documentation above describes is in these files, and everything in these files is described above. If you find a claim here that the code does not do, that is a bug — open an issue on the repo.

Changelog

• 1.9.2 — Fixed: the relay exporter no longer writes or chmods through a symlink or hard link planted inside a reused export directory, and a directory swapped for a symlink between validation and write is refused (Linux also checks the descriptor's real path and removes the empty file); docs aligned: cookie-only bookmarklet, export.sh writes nothing, only relay exports carry a manifest, node listed as a requirement, stale skill card rewritten.