notion-exporter

README

notion-exporter

Notion Exporter is a github action which allows you to export the content of your Notion (notion.so) pages and databases as markdown, to a github repo.

Both the target repo and the source workspace can be private. The Github free plan is good enough 🙏. The action uses the internal Notion API.

Demo

See igor-kupczynski/notion-exporter-demo.

Usage

1. Create a github repo

• Go to https://github.com/new
• Fill the details as needed
• The repo can be private

2. Find out the root page IDs you want to export

• You need to provide the IDs of the root pages/databases that you want to export. All children will be exported automatically.
• You can get the page IDs from the Share menu in Notion.
• Say the web link is https://www.notion.so/e9ddb02b4745455097ad9d5fef6336a2?v=530e3734d3ef461c76fcc349e28b7b7a, then your page ID is e9ddb02b4745455097ad9d5fef6336a2.
• You don't need to share the pages.
• Provide all the page IDs separated by a comma, e.g. e9ddb02b4745455097ad9d5fef6336a2,e65ccf14e13b48d1a6d1b14cd84c4bed

3. Add a new workflow

• Go to Actions tab and click Setup the workflow yourself.

• Paste the following code

  • Use your own page IDs in pages
  • Change 0/6 to how often you want to trigger the export. 0/6 means every 6 hours, 0/24 means every 24 hours.

name: Export my notion workspace

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 */6 * * *"  # Call the export every 6 hours
  workflow_dispatch: {}

jobs:
  export:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: igor-kupczynski/notion-exporter@v1.0.2
        with:
          pages: "e9ddb02b4745455097ad9d5fef6336a2,e65ccf14e13b48d1a6d1b14cd84c4bed"  # Pages IDs identified in (step 2)  
          output-dir: notion-backup
          notion-token: ${{ secrets.NOTION_TOKEN }}
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

• Click Start commit

• Click Commit new file

4. Grab the notion token

• We can't use the notion API unauthenticated. The export feature is not yet part of the public API (in beta), so we need to use the internal API.
• We need the value of the token_v2 cookie.
• You can grab it from your web browser. E.g. in chrome:
  1. Log-in to notion and go to your workspace.
  2. Open developer tools: Menu --> More Tools -> Developer Tools
  3. Go to Application tab
  4. Go tp Storage -> Cookies
  5. Copy the value of token_v2 cookie

(Screenshot from safari)

5. Setup the token as a secret

• Go to Settings tab, then Secretes and add a new secret.

8 Use NOTION_TOKEN as Name.

• Paste the token_v2 as the Value.

6. Trigger the export manually

• Test if the export works by manually triggering it.

• Go to Actions tab, then select Export my notion workspace on the left-hand side.

• Then select Run workflow and again Run workflow.

• In a minute or so you should see a successful run.

• Note the next runs should start automatically as per the schedule you've set up.

• Check the notion-backup folder for the content.

How does it work?

The action relies on the notion export feature. To call it programmatically we rely on the unofficial notion API go client.

Inputs

pages

Comma-separated list of page to export the data from. Pages are exported recursively, including their children.

E.g. e9ddb02b4745455097ad9d5fef6336a2,e65ccf14e13b48d1a6d1b14cd84c4bed.

github-token

Github token to use to commit to the repo. Most of the time we can pass the default github action token:

github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

notion-token

Value of the token_v2 cookie.

output-dir

Directory under your repo to sync the data to.

🔥🔥🔥 Note the existing content of the directory will be deleted, use with care.

In the demo we set it to notion-backup.

(optional) force-branch

By default, the action discovers the branch to commit to from the GITHUB_REF var, but you can override it with force-branch input.