Import from HipChat/Stride

Starting with Zulip 1.9, Zulip supports importing data from HipChat and Stride, including users, rooms, messages, avatars, and custom emoji.

This tool has been used to import HipChat teams with thousands of members, thousands of streams and millions of messages. If you're planning on doing an import much larger than that, or run into performance issues when importing, contact us.

Note: You can only import a HipChat or Stride group as a new Zulip organization. In particular, you cannot use this tool to import data into an existing Zulip organization.

Import from HipChat or Stride

First, export your data.

Import into Zulip Cloud

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

Also, see the caveats section notes on room subscribers and consider whether you want to also send a HipChat API key to provide a more faithful import.

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, skipping "Step 3: Create a Zulip organization, and log in" (you'll create your Zulip organization via the data import tool instead).

Use upgrade-zulip-from-git to upgrade your Zulip server to the latest master branch.

Log in to a shell on your Zulip server as the zulip user. To import with the most common configuration, run the following commands, replacing <exported_file> with the HipChat export file and <password> with the password you set during the HipChat export.

cd /home/zulip/deployments/current
supervisorctl stop all  # Stop the Zulip server
openssl aes-256-cbc -d -in <exported_file> -out hipchat.tar.gz -md md5 -pass pass:<password>
./manage.py convert_hipchat_data hipchat.tar.gz --output converted_hipchat_data
./manage.py import '' converted_hipchat_data
./scripts/restart-server

This could take 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> converted_hipchat_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

While the import tool will correctly import the subscribers of private rooms, HipChat does not store or export the list of subscribers for public rooms. You can pick one of the following options for handling this:

1. Subscribe all users to all public streams (the default, which is good for small organizations).

2. Subscribe only HipChat room owners to public streams (and plan for users to subscribe to the imported Zulip streams manually after the import completes) using the --slim-mode option to manage.py convert_hipchat_data.

3. Use the HipChat API to fetch each room's current room subscribers as of the moment the import is run. Because HipChat doesn't store subscribers to a room when clients are not connected, these subscriptons will be incomplete for users who don't have an actively connected client at the time of the import. You need to pass a HipChat access token via --token=abcd1234 in manage.py convert_hipchat_data (or include it in your request, if importing into Zulip Cloud).