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Import from Rocket.Chat

Starting with Zulip 5.0, Zulip supports importing data from Rocket.Chat, including users, teams, channels, discussions, messages, and more.

Note: You can only import a Rocket.Chat workspace as a new Zulip organization. In particular, you cannot use this tool to import data into an existing Zulip organization.

Import from Rocket.Chat

First, you need to export your data from Rocket.Chat. Rocket.Chat does not provide an official data export feature, so the Zulip import tool works by importing data from a Rocket.Chat database dump.

If you're self-hosting your Rocket.Chat instance, you can create a database dump using the mongodump utility.

If your organization is hosted on Rocket.Chat Cloud or another hosting provider that doesn't provide you with database access, you will need to request a database dump by contacting their support.

In either case, you should end up with a directory containing many .bson files.

Import into Zulip Cloud

Email support@zulip.com with your database dump and your desired Zulip subdomain. Your imported organization will be hosted at <subdomain>.zulipchat.com.

If you've already created a test organization at <subdomain>.zulipchat.com, let us know, and we can rename the old organization first.

Import into a self-hosted Zulip server

First install a new Zulip server with Zulip 5.0 or newer, skipping "Step 3: Create a Zulip organization, and log in" (you'll create your Zulip organization via the data import tool instead).

Now, get the directory containing all the bson files in your database dump and save it inside /home/zulip/rocketchat on your Zulip server and rename it to rocketchat (the directory at /home/zulip/rocketchat should contain all the bson files).

Log in to a shell on your Zulip server as the zulip user. To import with the most common configuration, run the following commands:

cd /home/zulip/deployments/current
./scripts/stop-server
./manage.py convert_rocketchat_data /home/zulip/rocketchat --output /home/zulip/converted_rocketchat_data
./manage.py import "" /home/zulip/converted_rocketchat_data
./scripts/start-server

This could take a few seconds to several minutes to run, depending on how much data you're importing. The server stop/restart is only necessary when importing on a server with minimal RAM, where an OOM kill might otherwise occur.

Import options

The commands above create an imported organization on the root domain (EXTERNAL_HOST) of the Zulip installation. You can also import into a custom subdomain, e.g. if you already have an existing organization on the root domain. Replace the last line above with the following, after replacing <subdomain> with the desired subdomain.

./manage.py import <subdomain> /home/zulip/converted_rocketchat_data

Logging in

Once the import completes, all your users will have accounts in your new Zulip organization, but those accounts won't have passwords yet (since for very good security reasons, passwords are not exported). Your users will need to either authenticate using something like Google auth, or start by resetting their passwords.

You can use the ./manage.py send_password_reset_email command to send password reset emails to your users. We recommend starting with sending one to yourself for testing:

./manage.py send_password_reset_email -u username@example.com

and then once you're ready, you can email them to everyone using e.g.

./manage.py send_password_reset_email -r '' --all-users

(replace '' with your subdomain if you're using one).

Caveats

This import tool is currently beta has the following known limitations:

  • User avatars are not imported.
  • Default channels for new users are not imported.
  • Starred messages are not imported.
  • Messages longer than Zulip's limit of 10,000 characters are not imported.
  • Messages from Rocket.Chat Discussions are imported as topics inside the Zulip stream corresponding to the parent channel of the Rocket.Chat Discussion.
  • Messages from Rocket.Chat Discussions having direct channels (i.e. private messages) as their parent are imported as normal private messages in Zulip.
  • While Rocket.Chat Threads are in general imported as separate topics, Rocket.Chat Threads within Rocket.Chat Discussions are imported as normal messages within the topic containing that Discussion, and Threads in Direct Messages are imported as normal Zulip private messages.

Additionally, because Rocket.Chat does not provide a documented or stable data export API, the import tool may require small changes from time to time to account for changes in the Rocket.Chat database format. Please contact us if you encounter any problems using this tool.