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Quickstart

Convert your first ChatGPT export in a few minutes.

Prerequisites

  • uv package manager

Step 1: Choose how to run the CLI

Use one of these tool-first options:

Option A: Run without installing

uvx chatgpt-to-markdown --help

uv tool install chatgpt-to-markdown
chatgpt-to-markdown --help

If you are contributing code in this repository, use the development setup in Installation.

Step 2: Export your ChatGPT data

  1. Go to ChatGPT Settings → Data controls → Export data.
  2. Click Export and wait for the confirmation email from OpenAI.
  3. Download the ZIP file from the email link.

Step 3: Run the converter

You can pass either the ZIP file directly or an extracted directory.

uvx chatgpt-to-markdown ./chatgpt_export_2024.zip ./archive

If you installed the tool globally, run:

chatgpt-to-markdown ./chatgpt_export_2024.zip ./archive

Unzip first, then run:

unzip chatgpt_export_2024.zip -d ./my-export
uvx chatgpt-to-markdown ./my-export ./archive

If you installed the tool globally, run:

chatgpt-to-markdown ./my-export ./archive

Step 4: Explore the output

The archive/ directory now contains your conversations:

archive/
├── index.md                              # Start here
├── conversations/
│   ├── index.md                          # Table of all conversations
│   └── 2024-08-24_my-first-chat_17cd7535/
│       ├── index.md                      # Rendered conversation
│       └── media/
│           └── 001-a1b2c3d4.jpeg
├── dalle/
│   └── index.md
└── metadata/
    ├── user_profile.md
    ├── settings.md
    ├── feedback.md
    └── export_stats.md

Open archive/index.md in any Markdown viewer, or serve it with a static site generator.

Common options

Control what gets included:

# Keep PII in user metadata (redacted by default)
uvx chatgpt-to-markdown ./export ./archive --no-redact-pii

# Include thinking/reasoning blocks from o-series models (excluded by default)
uvx chatgpt-to-markdown ./export ./archive --include-thinking

# Skip SHA-256 deduplication (enabled by default)
uvx chatgpt-to-markdown ./export ./archive --no-deduplicate

If you installed the CLI with uv tool install, remove the uvx prefix in all examples.

Next steps