Rework the CLI commands to be more composable

[Tyrrrz]

Currently, we have commands like exportguild, exportall, exportdm which allow the user to export batches of channels. There are some filtering options available in those commands (such as --include-vc, --include-threads, etc), but they are not very composable.

If the user wants to have full control over which channels they want to export, the recommended approach is to use the channels command to fetch all channels (with some filtering available too), and then manually plug the IDs into the export command.

We can streamline this flow by making the channels command more configurable in terms of filters and, most importantly, making its output pipe-able into export. The idea is that the export command will not have any filtering options whatsoever (and exportguild, exportall, exportdm will be completely removed), but instead the user can pipe the result of channels directly.

For example:

$ ./DiscordChatExporter.Cli channels --guild 123456 --token 123456 --include-threads --include-dm | ./DiscordChatExporter.Cli export --token 123456

(to avoid repeating the --token twice, you can set it as an environment variable)

The channels command can detect if its output is being redirected and change the format to only produce channel IDs, separated by newlines. If the output is not redirected, then the current, info-rich and user-friendly format is used. We can also add command options to control this behavior explicitly.

[CanePlayz]

Sounds great

[andlabs]

How will this change affect Docker use? I am using Docker now because my OS is slightly too old for the minimum supported .net version

[Tyrrrz]

How will this change affect Docker use? I am using Docker now because my OS is slightly too old for the minimum supported .net version

Your commands will change in the same way, but instead of ./DiscordChatExporter.Cli ... it would be docker run --rm tyrrrz/discordchatexporter:stable ...

[qwadratic]

Hi! I experienced same problem
But for my use case, among all forums I need only one to be exported.

When I try to export it using forum id - I get an error that this is a forum and threads should be exported separately
So now I am parsing the output of channels command, and extract only channel ids of threads that belong to my forum of interest.

Maybe you can add smth like --forum-id to export command?