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TrelloBoardsAutoExport

Export JSON of Trello boards using web scraping.

Contents

Background

About Trello

Trello.com is a website providing a visual organisation platform for lists, notes, projects or anything you want to organise. Trello boards are used to group visuals of your information.

Browse Trello boards samples to learn more

Why use this script

Trello provides a menu option within each board to export the contents in JSON format. These JSON exports can be used as a backup of information contained within each board. This script will automatically navigate to each board listed and export the JSON.
Why this may be helpful for you:

  • It's a handy way to perform a JSON export of all your Trello boards in a single click.
  • You can schedule this script to auto run at scheduled times, acting as an auto backup of your Trello boards (See AutoSchedule section).

Setup

Step 1. Trello account

You need a user account on Trello.com with at least one Trello board created. Know your Trello login email and password.

Step 2. Browser and driver

You need to have either Firefox or Chrome installed. You also need the corresponding driver for the browser.

For Firefox download geckodriver: https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases

For Chrome download chromedriver: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads

Step 3. Setup Python and modules

Python and the following modules must be installed on the computer running this script. Instructions tested on Ubuntu Linux distros, run commands on a terminal.

Install Python 3 and pip3:

sudo apt-get install python3
sudo apt-get install pip3

Install requirements:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

RunningScript

Step 1. Configure file

  • Open the file "trello-boards-export-info"
  • Set your browser and if you want to run in headless mode. (Headless mode means the browser window won't open while script is running)
  • Input your Trello email on the second line in the file.
  • Input your Trello password on the third line in the file (case-sensitive).
  • From the fourth line onwards, list the name of each board you want to export. One line per board.

Sample file configuration:

driver=firefox;headless=true
[email protected]
mysecretpassword
BOARDNAME_1
BOARDNAME_2

Step 2. Run the script

Run the python script through any compatible IDE. Or run on a terminal using:

python3 trello-boards-auto-export.py

The program should export the JSON of each board in the same directory as the script. The file exported will be in the format:

BOARDNAME_1_ddmmyyyy.json
BOARDNAME_2_ddmmyyyy.json

AutoSchedule

This section is optional and explains how to configure automated running of the script at a set schedule.

Using Crontab Linux utility

Schedule the time and frequency to run this script. See the Crontab man page.

Open the crontab file for editing

crontab -e

This example will run the script everyday at 07:05am. Edit according to your needs.

Add the following to the end of the crontab file

# needed if headless=false
DISPLAY=:0

# at 07:05am go to directory of script and run. log output and potential errors to 'crontab.log'
05 07 * * * cd /pathtoscript/ && python3 trello-boards-auto-export.py > crontab.log 2>&1

Save the crontab file

crontab: installing new crontab

The script should now run everyday at 07:05am.

Troubleshooting

  • A log file 'trello-scraping.log' is produced during running of the script. It will be located in the same directory as the script.

  • This script runs on Linux. Not tested on Windows yet.

Extras

Why use webscraping for this purpose?

Good question. Since webscraping manipluates HTML elements on a page, any change in the HTML layout of the website being controlled can result in failure when running a web scraping script. It means this script might need to be updated if Trello.com changed certain aspects of the site layout.

This is admittedly a huge disadvantage. However, I wrote this script to learn web scraping and test the limits of it :) Trello does have an API interface that can probably perform the same functionality much easier (not completely sure as I haven't tried that method yet).