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▶️ Quickstart | Demo | GitHub | Documentation | Info & Motivation | Community

   

ArchiveBox is a self-hosted app that lets you preserve content from websites in a variety of formats.

We aim to make your data immediately useful, and kept in formats that other programs can read directly. As output, we save standard HTML, PNG, PDF, TXT, JSON, WARC, SQLite, all guaranteed to be readable for decades to come. ArchiveBox also has a CLI, REST API, and webhooks so you can set up integrations with other services.

Without active preservation effort, everything on the internet eventually disappears or degrades.

ArchiveBox is an open source tool that lets organizations & individuals archive both public & private web content while retaining control over their data. It can be used to save copies of bookmarks, preserve evidence for legal cases, backup photos from FB/Insta/Flickr or media from YT/Soundcloud/etc., save research papers, and more...

➡️ Get ArchiveBox with pip install archivebox on Linux/macOS, or via Docker ⭐️ on any OS.

Once installed, you can interact with it through the: Browser Extension, CLI, self-hosted web interface, Python API, or filesystem.

📥 You can feed ArchiveBox URLs one at a time, or schedule regular imports from your bookmarks or history, social media feeds or RSS, link-saving services like Pocket/Pinboard, our Browser Extension, and more.
See Input Formats for a full list of supported input formats...

It saves snapshots of the URLs you feed it in several redundant formats.
It also detects any content featured inside pages & extracts it out into a folder:

  • 🌐 HTML/Any websites ➡️ original HTML+CSS+JS, singlefile HTML, screenshot PNG, PDF, WARC, title, article text, favicon, headers, ...
  • 🎥 Social Media/News ➡️ post content TXT, comments, title, author, images, ...
  • 🎬 YouTube/SoundCloud/etc. ➡️ MP3/MP4s, subtitles, metadata, thumbnail, ...
  • 💾 Github/Gitlab/etc. links ➡️ clone of GIT source code, README, images, ...
  • ✨ and more, see Output Formats below...

You can run ArchiveBox as a Docker web app to manage these snapshots, or continue accessing the same collection using the pip-installed CLI, Python API, and SQLite3 APIs. All the ways of using it are equivalent, and provide matching features like adding tags, scheduling regular crawls, viewing logs, and more...

🛠️ ArchiveBox uses standard tools like Chrome, wget, & yt-dlp, and stores data in ordinary files & folders.
(no complex proprietary formats, all data is readable without needing to run ArchiveBox)

The goal is to sleep soundly knowing the part of the internet you care about will be automatically preserved in durable, easily accessible formats for decades after it goes down.

📦  Install ArchiveBox using your preferred method: docker / pip / apt / etc. (see full Quickstart below).

Key Features

🤝 Professional Integration

ArchiveBox is free for everyone to self-host, but we also provide support, security review, and custom integrations to help NGOs, governments, and other organizations run ArchiveBox professionally:

  • Journalists: crawling during research, preserving cited pages, fact-checking & review
  • Lawyers: collecting & preserving evidence, detecting changes, tagging & review
  • Researchers: analyzing social media trends, getting LLM training data, crawling pipelines
  • Individuals: saving bookmarks, preserving portfolio content, legacy / memoirs archival
  • Governments: snapshoting public service sites, recordkeeping compliance

Contact us if your org wants help using ArchiveBox professionally.
We offer: setup & support, CAPTCHA/ratelimit unblocking, SSO, audit logging/chain-of-custody, and more
ArchiveBox is a 🏛️ 501(c)(3) nonprofit FSP and all our work supports open-source development.

Quickstart

🖥  Supported OSs: Linux/BSD, macOS, Windows (Docker)   👾  CPUs: amd64 (x86_64), arm64, arm7 (raspi>=3)

✳️  Easy Setup

See below for more usage examples using the CLI, Web UI, or filesystem/SQL/Python to manage your archive.

See below for more usage examples using the CLI, Web UI, or filesystem/SQL/Python to manage your archive.

See below for more usage examples using the CLI, Web UI, or filesystem/SQL/Python to manage your archive. See setup.sh for the source code of the auto-install script. See "Against curl | sh as an install method" blog post for my thoughts on the shortcomings of this install method.

🛠  Package Manager Setup

See below for more usage examples using the CLI, Web UI, or filesystem/SQL/Python to manage your archive. See the pip-archivebox repo for more details about this distribution.

See below for more usage examples using the CLI, Web UI, or filesystem/SQL/Python to manage your archive. See the homebrew-archivebox repo for more details about this distribution.

Warning: These are contributed by external volunteers and may lag behind the official pip channel.

🎗  Other Options

Warning: These are contributed by external volunteers and may lag behind the official pip channel.

For more discussion on managed and paid hosting options see here: Issue #531.

➡️  Next Steps

Usage

⚡️  CLI Usage

ArchiveBox commands can be run in a terminal directly on your host, or via Docker/Docker Compose.
(depending on how you chose to install it above)

mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data   # create a new data dir anywhere
cd ~/archivebox/data         # IMPORTANT: cd into the directory

# archivebox [subcommand] [--help]
archivebox version
archivebox help

# equivalent: docker compose run archivebox [subcommand] [--help]
docker compose run archivebox help

# equivalent: docker run -it -v $PWD:/data archivebox/archivebox [subcommand] [--help]
docker run -it -v $PWD:/data archivebox/archivebox help

ArchiveBox Subcommands

  • archivebox help/version to see the list of available subcommands / currently installed version info
  • archivebox setup/init/config/status/shell/manage to administer your collection
  • archivebox add/schedule to pull in fresh URLs from bookmarks/history/RSS/etc.
  • archivebox list/update/remove to manage existing Snapshots in your collection

Open http://localhost:8000 to see your server's Web UI ➡️ For more info, see our Usage: Web UI wiki. ➡️ Optional: Change permissions to allow non-logged-in users

[!TIP] Whether in Docker or not, ArchiveBox commands work the same way, and can be used to access the same data on-disk. For example, you could run the Web UI in Docker Compose, and run one-off commands with pip-installed ArchiveBox.

For more info, see our Docker wiki. ➡️

Overview

Input Formats: How to pass URLs into ArchiveBox for saving

  • From the official ArchiveBox Browser Extension
    Provides realtime archiving of browsing history or selected pages from Chrome/Chromium/Firefox browsers.

  • From manual imports of URLs from RSS, JSON, CSV, TXT, SQL, HTML, Markdown, etc. files
    ArchiveBox supports injesting URLs in any text-based format.

  • From manually exported browser history or browser bookmarks (in Netscape format)
    Instructions: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera, and more...

  • From URLs visited through a MITM Proxy with archivebox-proxy
    Provides realtime archiving of all traffic from any device going through the proxy.

  • From bookmarking services or social media (e.g. Twitter bookmarks, Reddit saved posts, etc.)
    Instructions: Pocket, Pinboard, Instapaper, Shaarli, Delicious, Reddit Saved, Wallabag, Unmark.it, OneTab, Firefox Sync, and more...

# archivebox add --help
archivebox add 'https://example.com/some/page'
archivebox add --parser=generic_rss < ~/Downloads/some_feed.xml
archivebox add --depth=1 'https://news.ycombinator.com#2020-12-12'
echo 'http://example.com' | archivebox add
echo 'any text with <a href="https://example.com">urls</a> in it' | archivebox add

# if using Docker, add -i when piping stdin:
# echo 'https://example.com' | docker run -v $PWD:/data -i archivebox/archivebox add
# if using Docker Compose, add -T when piping stdin / stdout:
# echo 'https://example.com' | docker compose run -T archivebox add

See the Usage: CLI page for documentation and examples.

It also includes a built-in scheduled import feature with archivebox schedule and browser bookmarklet, so you can pull in URLs from RSS feeds, websites, or the filesystem regularly/on-demand.

Output Formats: What ArchiveBox saves for each URL

For each web page added, ArchiveBox creates a Snapshot folder and preserves its content as ordinary files inside the folder (e.g. HTML, PDF, PNG, JSON, etc.).

It uses all available methods out-of-the-box, but you can disable extractors and fine-tune the configuration as-needed.

data/archive/{Snapshot.id}/

Configuration

ArchiveBox can be configured via environment variables, by using the archivebox config CLI, or by editing ./ArchiveBox.conf.

The configuration is documented here: Configuration Wiki, and loaded here: archivebox/config.py.

Dependencies

To achieve high-fidelity archives in as many situations as possible, ArchiveBox depends on a variety of 3rd-party libraries and tools that specialize in extracting different types of content.

Under-the-hood, ArchiveBox uses Django to power its Web UI, Django Ninja for the REST API, and SQlite + the filesystem to provide fast & durable metadata storage w/ deterministic upgrades.

ArchiveBox bundles industry-standard tools like Google Chrome, wget, yt-dlp, readability, etc. internally, and its operation can be tuned, secured, and extended as-needed for many different applications.

These optional subdependencies used for archiving sites include:

You don't need to install every dependency to use ArchiveBox. ArchiveBox will automatically disable extractors that rely on dependencies that aren't installed, based on what is configured and available in your $PATH.

If not using Docker, make sure to keep the dependencies up-to-date yourself and check that ArchiveBox isn't reporting any incompatibility with the versions you install.

Installing directly on Windows without Docker or WSL/WSL2/Cygwin is not officially supported (I cannot respond to Windows support tickets), but some advanced users have reported getting it working.

Archive Layout

All of ArchiveBox's state (SQLite DB, content, config, logs, etc.) is stored in a single folder per collection.

Data folders can be created anywhere (~/archivebox/data or $PWD/data as seen in our examples), and you can create as many data folders as you want to hold different collections. All archivebox CLI commands are designed to be run from inside an ArchiveBox data folder, starting with archivebox init to initialize a new collection inside an empty directory.

The on-disk layout is optimized to be easy to browse by hand and durable long-term. The main index is a standard index.sqlite3 database in the root of the data folder (it can also be exported as static JSON/HTML), and the archive snapshots are organized by date-added timestamp in the data/archive/ subfolder.

Each snapshot subfolder data/archive/TIMESTAMP/ includes a static index.json and index.html describing its contents, and the snapshot extractor outputs are plain files within the folder.

Static Archive Exporting

You can export your index as static HTML using archivebox list (so you can view it without an ArchiveBox server).

The paths in the static exports are relative, make sure to keep them next to your ./archive folder when backing them up or viewing them.

Caveats

Archiving Private Content

If you're importing pages with private content or URLs containing secret tokens you don't want public (e.g Google Docs, paywalled content, unlisted videos, etc.), you may want to disable some of the extractor methods to avoid leaking that content to 3rd party APIs or the public.

Security Risks of Viewing Archived JS

Be aware that malicious archived JS can access the contents of other pages in your archive when viewed. Because the Web UI serves all viewed snapshots from a single domain, they share a request context and typical CSRF/CORS/XSS/CSP protections do not work to prevent cross-site request attacks. See the Security Overview page and Issue #239 for more details.

Working Around Sites that Block Archiving

For various reasons, many large sites (Reddit, Twitter, Cloudflare, etc.) actively block archiving or bots in general. There are a number of approaches to work around this, and we also provide consulting services to help here.

In the future we plan on adding support for running JS scripts during archiving to block ads, cookie popups, modals, and fix other issues. Follow here for progress: Issue #51.

Saving Multiple Snapshots of a Single URL

ArchiveBox appends a hash with the current date https://example.com#2020-10-24 to differentiate when a single URL is archived multiple times.

Because ArchiveBox uniquely identifies snapshots by URL, it must use a workaround to take multiple snapshots of the same URL (otherwise they would show up as a single Snapshot entry). It makes the URLs of repeated snapshots unique by adding a hash with the archive date at the end:

The button in the Admin UI is a shortcut for this hash-date multi-snapshotting workaround.

Improved support for saving multiple snapshots of a single URL without this hash-date workaround will be added eventually (along with the ability to view diffs of the changes between runs).

Storage Requirements

Because ArchiveBox is designed to ingest a large volume of URLs with multiple copies of each URL stored by different 3rd-party tools, it can be quite disk-space intensive. There are also some special requirements when using filesystems like NFS/SMB/FUSE.

Screenshots

Background & Motivation

ArchiveBox aims to enable more of the internet to be saved from deterioration by empowering people to self-host their own archives. The intent is for all the web content you care about to be viewable with common software in 50 - 100 years without needing to run ArchiveBox or other specialized software to replay it.

Vast treasure troves of knowledge are lost every day on the internet to link rot. As a society, we have an imperative to preserve some important parts of that treasure, just like we preserve our books, paintings, and music in physical libraries long after the originals go out of print or fade into obscurity.

Whether it's to resist censorship by saving news articles before they get taken down or edited, or just to save a collection of early 2010's flash games you loved to play, having the tools to archive internet content enables to you save the stuff you care most about before it disappears.

The balance between the permanence and ephemeral nature of content on the internet is part of what makes it beautiful. I don't think everything should be preserved in an automated fashion--making all content permanent and never removable, but I do think people should be able to decide for themselves and effectively archive specific content that they care about, just like libraries do. Without the work of archivists saving physical books, manuscrips, and paintings we wouldn't have any knowledge of our ancestors' history. I believe archiving the web is just as important to provide the same benefit to future generations.

ArchiveBox's stance is that duplication of other people's content is only ethical if it:

  • A. doesn't deprive the original creators of revenue and
  • B. is responsibly curated by an individual/institution.

In the U.S., libraries, researchers, and archivists are allowed to duplicate copyrighted materials under "fair use" for private study, scholarship, or research. Archive.org's non-profit preservation work is covered under fair use in the US, and they properly handle unethical content/DMCA/GDPR removal requests to maintain good standing in the eyes of the law.

As long as you A. don't try to profit off pirating copyrighted content and B. have processes in place to respond to removal requests, many countries allow you to use sofware like ArchiveBox to ethically and responsibly archive any web content you can view. That being said, ArchiveBox is not liable for how you choose to operate the software. You must research your own local laws and regulations, and get proper legal council if you plan to host a public instance (start by putting your DMCA/GDPR contact info in FOOTER_INFO and changing your instance's branding using CUSTOM_TEMPLATES_DIR).

Comparison to Other Projects

Check out our community wiki for a list of alternative web archiving tools and orgs.

ArchiveBox gained momentum in the internet archiving industry because it uniquely combines 3 things:

  • it's distributed: users own their data instead of entrusting it to one big central provider
  • it's future-proof: saving in multiple formats and extracting out raw TXT, PNG, PDF, MP4, etc. files
  • it's extensible: with powerful APIs, flexible storage, and a big community adding new extractors regularly

ArchiveBox tries to be a robust, set-and-forget archiving solution suitable for archiving RSS feeds, bookmarks, or your entire browsing history (beware, it may be too big to store), including private/authenticated content that you wouldn't otherwise share with a centralized service like Archive.org.

Not all content is suitable to be archived on a centralized, publicly accessible platform. Archive.org doesn't offer the ability to save things behind login walls for good reason, as the content may not have been intended for a public audience. ArchiveBox exists to fill that gap by letting everyone save what they have access to on an individual basis, and to encourage decentralized archiving that's less succeptible to censorship or natural disasters.

By having users store their content locally or within their organizations, we can also save much larger portions of the internet than a centralized service has the disk capcity handle. The eventual goal is to work towards federated archiving where users can share portions of their collections with each other, and with central archives on a case-by-case basis.

ArchiveBox differentiates itself from similar self-hosted projects by providing both a comprehensive CLI interface for managing your archive, a Web UI that can be used either independently or together with the CLI, and a simple on-disk data format that can be used without either.

If you want better fidelity for very complex interactive pages with heavy JS/streams/API requests, check out ArchiveWeb.page and ReplayWeb.page.

If you want more bookmark categorization and note-taking features, check out Memex, Hoarder, LinkWarden, Archivy, or LinkAce.

If you need more advanced recursive spider/crawling ability beyond --depth=1, check out Browsertrix, Photon, or Scrapy and pipe the outputted URLs into ArchiveBox.

For more alternatives, see our list here...

ArchiveBox is neither the highest fidelity nor the simplest tool available for self-hosted archiving, rather it's a jack-of-all-trades that tries to do most things well by default. We encourage you to try these other tools made by our friends if ArchiveBox isn't suited to your needs.

Internet Archiving Ecosystem

Need help building a custom archiving solution?

✨ Hire the team that built Archivebox to solve archiving for your org. (@ArchiveBoxApp)

Documentation

We use the ArchiveBox GitHub Wiki for documentation.

There is also a mirror available on Read the Docs (though it's sometimes outdated).

✏️ You can submit docs changes & suggestions in our dedicated repo ArchiveBox/docs.

Getting Started

Advanced

Developers

More Info

ArchiveBox Development

All contributions to ArchiveBox are welcomed! Check our issues and Roadmap for things to work on, and please open an issue to discuss your proposed implementation before working on things! Otherwise we may have to close your PR if it doesn't align with our roadmap.

For low hanging fruit / easy first tickets, see: ArchiveBox/Issues #good first ticket #help wanted.

Python API Documentation: https://docs.archivebox.io/en/dev/archivebox.html#module-archivebox.main

Internal Architecture Diagrams: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/ArchiveBox-Architecture-Diagrams

Setup the dev environment

1. Clone the main code repo (making sure to pull the submodules as well)

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox
cd ArchiveBox
git checkout dev  # or the branch you want to test
git submodule update --init --recursive
git pull --recurse-submodules

2. Option A: Install the Python, JS, and system dependencies directly on your machine

# Install ArchiveBox + python dependencies
pip install uv
./bin/lock_pkgs.sh         # (aka `uv venv; uv sync;` + generate requirements.txt)

# Install ArchiveBox runtime dependencies
mkdir -p data && cd data
archivebox install         # on >=v0.8.5 (otherwise `archivebox setup`)

# Run the development server w/ autoreloading (but no bg workers)
archivebox manage runserver --debug --reload 0.0.0.0:8000

# Run the production server (with bg workers but no autoreloading)
archivebox server 0.0.0.0:8000

2. Option B: Build the docker container and use that for development instead

# Optional: develop via docker by mounting the code dir into the container
# if you edit e.g. ./archivebox/core/models.py on the docker host, runserver
# inside the container will reload and pick up your changes
./bin/build_docker.sh dev

docker run -it -v $PWD/data:/data archivebox/archivebox:dev init --setup

# Run the development server w/ autoreloading (but no bg workers)
docker run -it -v $PWD/data:/data -v $PWD/archivebox:/app/archivebox -p 8000:8000 archivebox/archivebox:dev manage runserver 0.0.0.0:8000 --debug --reload

# Run the production server (with bg workers but no autoreloading)
docker run -it -v $PWD/data:/data -v $PWD/archivebox:/app/archivebox -p 8000:8000 archivebox/archivebox:dev server

# (remove the --reload flag and add the --nothreading flag when profiling with the django debug toolbar)
# When using --reload, make sure any files you create can be read by the user in the Docker container, eg with 'chmod a+rX'.

Common development tasks

See the ./bin/ folder and read the source of the bash scripts within. You can also run all these in Docker. For more examples see the GitHub Actions CI/CD tests that are run: .github/workflows/*.yaml.

Run in DEBUG mode

# set up persistent DEBUG=True for all runs
archivebox config --set DEBUG=True

# OR you can run a dev server with DEBUG=True in a few ways:
archivebox manage runserver --debug --reload 0.0.0.0:8000
# or
archivebox server --debug 0.0.0.0:8000
# or
env DEBUG=True daphne -b 0.0.0.0 -p 8000 archivebox.core.asgi:application

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1074212/how-can-i-see-the-raw-sql-queries-django-is-running

Install and run a specific GitHub branch

Use a Pre-Built Image

If you're looking for the latest dev Docker image, it's often available pre-built on Docker Hub, simply pull and use archivebox/archivebox:dev.

docker pull archivebox/archivebox:dev
docker run archivebox/archivebox:dev version
# verify the BUILD_TIME and COMMIT_HASH in the output are recent
Build Branch from Source

You can also build and run any branch yourself from source, for example to build & use dev locally:

# docker-compose.yml:
services:
    archivebox:
        image: archivebox/archivebox:dev
        build: 'https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox.git#dev'
        ...

# or with plain Docker:
docker build -t archivebox:dev https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox.git#dev
docker run -it -v $PWD:/data archivebox:dev init

# or with pip:
pip install 'git+https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox@dev'
npm install 'git+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox.git#dev'
archivebox install

Run the linters / tests

./bin/lint.sh
./bin/test.sh

(uses flake8, mypy, and pytest -s)

Make DB migrations, enter Django shell, other dev helper commands

# generate the database migrations after changes to models.py
cd archivebox/
./manage.py makemigrations

# enter a python shell or a SQL shell
cd path/to/test/data/
archivebox shell
archivebox manage dbshell

# generate a graph of the ORM models
brew install graphviz
pip install pydot graphviz
archivebox manage graph_models -a -o orm.png
open orm.png

# list all models with field db info and methods
archivebox manage list_model_info --all --signature --db-type --field-class

# print all django settings
archivebox manage print_settings
archivebox manage print_settings --format=yaml    # pip install pyyaml

# autogenerate an admin.py from given app models
archivebox manage admin_generator core > core/admin.py

# dump db data to a script that re-populates it
archivebox manage dumpscript core > scripts/testdata.py
archivebox manage reset core
archivebox manage runscript testdata

# resetdb and clear all data!
archivebox manage reset_db

# use django-tui to interactively explore commands
pip install django-tui
# ensure django-tui is in INSTALLED_APPS: core/settings.py
archivebox manage tui

# show python and JS package dependency trees
pdm list --tree
npm ls --all

Contributing a new extractor

ArchiveBox extractors are external binaries or Python/Node scripts that ArchiveBox runs to archive content on a page.

Extractors take the URL of a page to archive, write their output to the filesystem data/archive/TIMESTAMP/EXTRACTOR/..., and return an ArchiveResult entry which is saved to the database (visible on the Log page in the UI).

Check out how we added archivebox/extractors/singlefile.py as an example of the process: Issue #399 + PR #403.

The process to contribute a new extractor is like this:

[!IMPORTANT] This process is getting much easier after v0.8.x, there is a new plugin system under development: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/releases/tag/v0.8.4-rc

  1. Open an issue with your propsoed implementation (please link to the pages of any new external dependencies you plan on using)
  2. Ensure any dependencies needed are easily installable via a package managers like apt, brew, pip3, npm (Ideally, prefer to use external programs available via pip3 or npm, however we do support using any binary installable via package manager that exposes a CLI/Python API and writes output to stdout or the filesystem.)
  3. Create a new file in archivebox/extractors/EXTRACTOR.py (copy an existing extractor like singlefile.py as a template)
  4. Add config settings to enable/disable any new dependencies and the extractor as a whole, e.g. USE_DEPENDENCYNAME, SAVE_EXTRACTORNAME, EXTRACTORNAME_SOMEOTHEROPTION in archivebox/config.py
  5. Add a preview section to archivebox/templates/core/snapshot.html to view the output, and a column to archivebox/templates/core/index_row.html with an icon for your extractor
  6. Add an integration test for your extractor in tests/test_extractors.py
  7. Submit your PR for review! 🎉
  8. Once merged, please document it in these places and anywhere else you see info about other extractors:

Build the docs, pip package, and docker image

(Normally CI takes care of this, but these scripts can be run to do it manually)

./bin/build.sh

# or individually:
./bin/build_docs.sh
./bin/build_pip.sh
./bin/build_docker.sh

Roll a release

(Normally CI takes care of this, but these scripts can be run to do it manually)

./bin/release.sh

# or individually:
./bin/release_docs.sh
./bin/release_pip.sh
./bin/release_docker.sh

Further Reading

Self-hosted internet archiving solution.

Github