Question
How can I export my Help Center content?
Answer
For Help Center content, there isn't a prebuilt Zendesk tool to export articles. We recommend leveraging the Help Center API to export the data. For more information on using the API to back up your content, see the article: Zendesk Rest API tutorial - Backing up your knowledge base with Python. Alternatively, use the kBackup, a third-party app developed to backup Help Center content. For more information, see the Community post: Backup your Help Center articles at the click of a button.
For the HTML, CSS, and Javascript code, if you are on Guide Professional or Enterprise plans, you can export your Help Center theme, see the article: Importing and exporting your theme and manifest file. For all the other plans, we recommend copying and pasting the code into a third-party text editor and saving externally. There is no means to access the code using the Help Center API.
28 Comments
I've had to use the Help Center API a bit to get data that I need for performance analysis.
It can be a pain, so I wanted to share some of the tools I've used thus far to hopefully help speed up the process for other Help Center managers.
Here is a very [underdeveloped] GitHub repository that has a couple scripts that exports article information to a CSV:
https://github.com/scotthavard92/Zendesk-Help-Center-Export-Scripts
Feel free to add/tweak/help with this. I know people probably have used tons of different approaches, and this is just one small one. It also may have a little barrier to entry if you haven't used API's before. I am happy to make changes to help get over this hurdle or get people familiar with the process.
Also feel free to reach out with questions.
Hi Scott! Thank you for sharing this!
If you're up for it, it would be awesome if you could flesh this out a bit and add a post about it to our Tips & Tricks section! I know a lot of people would find it helpful, and you'll get a gift from us for your effort. :)
When is Zendesk going to add the feature to download a help center article as a PDF? I am aware of the available add-ons, but I think that this should be a baked-in feature.
Hey Andy -
Here's a tip from the Zendesk Community on how to implement the ability to do this in your Help Center:
Printing/PDF/Emailing Help Center Articles
I do not believe that this is something that the Product team has on the roadmap as a native feature. If you'd like to make a feature request, here's how to do that.
Hi all!
I went ahead and submitted a community tip as suggested by Jessie outlining the script described above. I also made a video describing the process. You can find that here:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360004281807-Export-Zendesk-Guide-Data-as-CSV
Thanks!
Thanks so much for taking time to share your tip, Scott. It's a good one!
I've added it to our list of Help Center tips from the community.
Hello Team,
There is a service Help Desk Migration https://help-desk-migration.com/zendesk-to-csv-migration/ that allows exporting data to the CSV file.
I agree with Dmitry above. Shocking response to not build this feature, which should have been baked in from Day 1, if not 2. Very frustrating to create all this content and then not be able to export and send when needed.
Hi Dmitry & Chris -
Thanks for your frank and honest feedback. I've shared your comments with our Voice of the Customer team.
In general, the best place to provide feedback is in the product feedback forums in the community. Our product managers subscribe to those topics and receive notifications of posts that are share there. As the official place to register feedback, other users are also more likely to find it there and vote for your suggestion.
We receive thousands of pieces of feedback every month, so it is true that we aren't able to address all of them, and some linger longer than would be ideal. However, so long as a post is open, that means it's something that may make it to the roadmap and has continued to be actively requested by our users. There are also hundreds of requests that we do build based on user feedback in the forums, they just get a little buried by the mass of feedback we receive and can't respond to all at once.
Thank you for being passionate about our products and sharing your pain points. We value our users' input and take it into account when planning our product roadmaps.
Zendesk team - one thing I want to raise is how much market value and strength you will attain if you build in some native PDF rendering capability. At least put it in your roadmap.
You are already more than halfway there with your guide. Imagine if at the push of a button you allow us to create a good looking PDF extract we can share with our users. There will always be the users who want that PDF doc vs going to an online guide.
If you allow us to stay in your ecosystem for documentation, we wouldn't go to Confluence, Documentor, Word or anything else!
I am shocked that there's not an easy XLS/CSV export option to give me a list of every single article thats in our inventory. Can someone explain to me like I'm a 5 year old how to use these apis to get that information? I dont want to manually make a list but I may have to since the api page is not clear on what I need to do....(it assumes I have a more technical background than I do).
Ashley Schwartau, not need to learn API.
Our service allows the export without programming skills necessary.
Just register here (https://app.help-desk-migration.com) and stick to the Migration Wizard.
Will this export the articles in our help center? This looks like it might be for the other parts of ZenDesk like tickets and such? I dont have that admin privileges so I'll need to get with someone else on my team to do this if it will actually output a csv or xls of every article in our help center.
Hi Ashley Schwartau,
I made a youtube video with the script that I posted above to hopefully make the process straight forward.
https://youtu.be/nGYQwV-kpyE
good luck!
Hey Scott Havard! Definitely intimidating to layer 7 folks like me, BUT your video was super helpful and presented it in a non scary manner :) I made it to the point where I enter our ZD domain and my email/pw.... but I keep getting this error:
ssl.SSLError: [SSL: SSLV3_ALERT_HANDSHAKE_FAILURE] sslv3 alert handshake failure (_ssl.c:1122)
Any ideas? Since Im not the admin on our account, will I not be able to run the script?
I'd do a search for that error — it's typically the client-side library is not on the right ssl "wavelength" as the remote server. This thread talks about it: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/192944/how-to-fix-curl-sslv3-alert-handshake-failure
You can quickly export Zendesk articles into CSV for free with Import2. It actually also support loading many other Zendesk objects too, if that helps.
Would love to see a native ability to download knowledge bases into PDF manuals.
Would be incredibly useful for external departments who are not on our Zendesk instance.
Current apps by kolibri digital (Knowledge Base to PDF) does not work =[
I managed to get through the steps that Scott Harvard outlines in the video above, but it doesn't ultimately give me the right information. Here's what I got:
1) We have 115 articles in our Zendesk Guide, but the Python script only finds 9 articles:
2) The actual content of the article is extracted as a URL, which doesn't meet our needs as we're wanting to use the data elsewhere.
I'm assuming I've missed something, but I was pretty methodical and the process did succeed as per the video.
Any further suggestions? Still can't get me head around why there isn't a native export function. This is probably the the last straw for us in terms of Zendesk as a KB.
Hey Grant,
Why are you wasting your time with scripts?
Help Desk Migration service can export and import your data easily and quickly.
With your amount of data, it will cost around $95.
Now calculate how much time did you waste.
It wasn't a huge waste of time, but from the posts above it did seem like it was pretty much dialled in, but unfortunately not. We're going to migrate. Thanks
@... - the CSV output from your paid service is pretty time-consuming to understand and work through. I've just gone through the whole (non-time wasting) process (including payment) and I get the following that I need to work through in order to restructure the data.
Hey Grant Harding,
Sorry to leave you hanging. To be honest, I haven't looked at this stuff much lately and am not sure if Zendesk has changed their APIs at all.
That being said, do you have a lot of internal articles? I realized that you need to use OAuth in order for those to be included in the export. This script uses OAuth: https://github.com/scotthavard92/Zendesk-Help-Center-Export-Scripts/blob/master/Article_Information_Export/OAuth_Full_Export.py
I didn't cover that in the video, but the process is largely the same.
Some of the comments in this post discuss the oAuth stuff and problems people have hit: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360004281807-Export-Zendesk-Guide-Data-as-CSV.
If it isn't that, let us know! Maybe crosspost in the other post and see if anyone in the community hit any similar blockers. Good luck!!! If it isn't the OAuth stuff let me know and I can try to find time to revisit the API.
Hello Grant Harding,
May I know what is wrong with the file and what did you expect to see?
Our Support Team is here to help you with all the difficulties contact@help-desk-migration.com
By the way, did you try our Free Demo to see how your data will look like before the payment?
@... - my apologies. It was simply an Excel issue on my side. When I use a proper CSV conversion it works great. Thanks for that.
Happy that you are satisfied with the results!
Let me know if I can help you in any other way!
Hi everybody,
I've been working on an app that allows you to export a list of all articles in Zendesk Guide. It also exports the broken links & images for each article.
It is available on Zendesk's apps marketplace.
Register and get your free help center export
Hey all, I'm looking to use this script with Single Sign On and have been encountering some trouble. I pulled an API token to use instead of a password, as I do not functionally have one and using what I saw in this article
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/231530827-What-are-my-credentials-for-API-access-when-using-SSO-to-sign-in-
But I am still prompted to enter a password. I assume this is just because of how the script is written but I am looking for advice on how to export my articles without a 3rd party app or paid service. Thanks!
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