Export your LiveJournal blog data

Livejournal provides a method to export your posts as XML. However this has to be done manually for every month of your blog. Also comments are exported separately. I wrote this tool to make exporting more convenient.

You will need Python 3 to use it.

Usage:

Usage: export.py [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:

• --help Show this message and exit.

Commands:

• export

  • Login, Download comments and posts, and Export data to markdown/html
  • Options:
    • -ys, --year_start first 4 digit year to include entries from. e.g. 1998
    • -ye, --year_end first 4 digit year to exclude entries from. e.g. 2023
    • -s, --skip_download Do not download from livejournal, process already downloaded files.

• download comments

  • Login and Download all comments.

• download posts

  • Login and Download all posts.
  • Options:
    • -ys, --year_start first 4 digit year to include entries from. e.g. 1998
    • -ye, --year_end first 4 digit year to exclude entries from. e.g. 2023

• logout

  • Delete saved login session

download subcommands:

export

This command is the main entry point, see commands above. If you are not logged in, it will prompt you for username and password and save the session cookies (in lj.cookies) if login succeeds. Session cookies will be reused until deleted (with logout)

After running export.py export You will end up with full blog contents in several formats. posts-html folder will contain basic HTML of posts and comments. posts-markdown will contain posts in Markdown format with HTML comments and metadata necessary to generate a static blog with Pelican. posts-json will contain posts with nested comments in JSON format should you want to process them further.

download posts

This command will download your posts in XML into posts-xml folder. Also it will create posts-json/all.json file with all the same data in JSON format for convenient processing.

download comments

This command will download comments from your blog as comments-xml/*.xml files. Also it will create comments-json/all.json with all the comments data in JSON format for convenient processing.

logout

This command will delete the saved session login information in lj.cookies.

Requirements

• click
• html2text
• markdown
• beautifulsoup4
• requests

Processing exported data separately

Use the -skip_download option of export to skip the downloading step and go directly to the processing of already downloaded data.