ArchiveBox
Open-source self-hosted web archiving.

▶️ 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>=0.9.0rc0' on Linux/macOS, or via Docker ⭐️ on Linux/macOS.

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 uv-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 / uv / brew / apt / etc. (see full Quickstart below).

# Option A: Get ArchiveBox with Docker Compose (recommended):
mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data && cd ~/archivebox
curl -fsSL 'https://docker-compose.archivebox.io' > docker-compose.yml
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d --wait                                                # initializes new collections automatically
# open http://admin.archivebox.localhost:8000 to finish setup
# docker compose run --rm archivebox add 'https://example.com'
# docker compose run --rm archivebox help


# Option B: Or use it as a plain Docker container:
mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data && cd ~/archivebox/data
docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD:/data" archivebox/archivebox:dev init
docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD:/data" archivebox/archivebox:dev install
docker run -d --name archivebox -v "$PWD:/data" -p 8000:8000 archivebox/archivebox:dev
# open http://admin.archivebox.localhost:8000 to finish setup
# docker run -it -v $PWD:/data archivebox/archivebox:dev add 'https://example.com'
# docker run -it -v $PWD:/data archivebox/archivebox:dev help


# Option C: Or install it with uv (see Quickstart below for apt, brew, and more)
uv tool install --python 3.13 --prerelease explicit --upgrade 'archivebox>=0.9.0rc0,<0.10'
mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data && cd ~/archivebox/data
archivebox init
archivebox install
# archivebox add 'https://example.com'
# archivebox help
# archivebox server 0.0.0.0:8000


# Option D: Or use the uv install shortcut for Option C
curl -fsSL 'https://get.archivebox.io' | bash

   

Demo | Screenshots | Usage
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

• Free & open source, own your own data & maintain your privacy by self-hosting
• Powerful CLI with modular dependencies and support for Google Drive/NFS/SMB/S3/B2/etc.
• Comprehensive documentation, active development, and rich community
• Extracts a wide variety of content out-of-the-box: media (yt-dlp), articles (readability), code (git), etc.
• Supports scheduled/realtime importing from many types of sources
• Uses standard, durable, long-term formats like HTML, JSON, PDF, PNG, MP4, TXT, and WARC
• Powerful CLI, self-hosted web UI, Python API (BETA), REST API (ALPHA), or desktop app
• Saves all pages to archive.org as well by default for redundancy (can be disabled for local-only mode)
• Advanced users: support for archiving content requiring login/paywall/cookies (see wiki security caveats!)
• Planned: support for running JS during archiving to adblock, autoscroll, modal-hide, thread-expand

🖥  Supported OSs: Ubuntu, macOS, Docker   👾  CPUs: amd64 (x86_64), arm64

docker-compose

1. Install Docker on your system (if not already installed).
2. Download the docker-compose.yml file into a new empty directory (can be anywhere).

   mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data && cd ~/archivebox
   curl -fsSL 'https://docker-compose.archivebox.io' > docker-compose.yml
   docker compose pull

3. Start the server, which initializes a new collection automatically.

   docker compose up -d --wait

4. Open /admin/ on the hostname or IP used to reach ArchiveBox (local example: http://admin.archivebox.localhost:8000/admin/) to create the first admin. If BASE_URL is not configured yet, continue through the web setup wizard.

   # run CLI commands inside the server container started above
   docker compose exec archivebox archivebox add 'https://example.com'
   docker compose exec archivebox archivebox help

   For more info, see Install: Docker Compose in the Wiki. ➡️

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

docker run

1. Install Docker on your system (if not already installed).
2. Create a new empty directory and initialize your collection (can be anywhere).

   mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data && cd ~/archivebox/data
   docker run --rm -v $PWD:/data -it archivebox/archivebox:dev init
   docker run --rm -v $PWD:/data -it archivebox/archivebox:dev install

3. Optional: Start the server, then open /admin/ on the hostname or IP used to reach ArchiveBox (local example: http://admin.archivebox.localhost:8000/admin/) to create the first admin. If BASE_URL is not configured yet, continue through the web setup wizard.

   docker run -v $PWD:/data -p 8000:8000 archivebox/archivebox:dev
   # completely optional, CLI can always be used without running a server
   # docker run -v $PWD:/data -it archivebox/archivebox:dev [subcommand] [--help]
   docker run -v $PWD:/data -it archivebox/archivebox:dev help

   For more info, see Install: Docker Compose in the Wiki. ➡️

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

bash uv install shortcut

1. Run the shortcut for the uv install method. It installs uv first when needed.

   curl -fsSL 'https://get.archivebox.io' | bash

   For more info, see Install: Bare Metal in the Wiki. ➡️

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 uv install shortcut.
See "Against curl | sh as an install method" blog post for my thoughts on the shortcomings of this install method.

uv

1. Install uv on your system (if not already installed).
2. Install the ArchiveBox package using uv.

   uv tool install --python 3.13 --prerelease explicit --upgrade 'archivebox>=0.9.0rc0,<0.10'
   archivebox version

   See the Install: Bare Metal Wiki for full install instructions for each OS...
3. Create a new empty directory and initialize your collection (can be anywhere).

   mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data && cd ~/archivebox/data   # for example
   archivebox init     # initialize a new collection
   archivebox install  # install all the runtime dependencies (e.g. chrome, single-file, yt-dlp, etc.)

4. Optionally start the server, then open /admin/ on the hostname or IP used to reach ArchiveBox (local example: http://admin.archivebox.localhost:8000/admin/) to create the first admin. If BASE_URL is not configured yet, continue through the same web setup wizard used by Docker installs.

   archivebox server 0.0.0.0:8000
   # completely optional, CLI can always be used without running a server
   # archivebox [subcommand] [--help]
   archivebox help

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

See the uv tool documentation for more details about this installation method.

apt

1. Add the third-party ArchiveBox apt repo and install archivebox.

   echo 'deb [trusted=yes] https://archivebox.github.io/debian-archivebox dev main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/archivebox.list
   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install archivebox
   (cd /tmp && archivebox version)            # make sure the package is installed

2. Create a new empty directory and initialize your collection (can be anywhere).

   mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data
   cd ~/archivebox/data
   archivebox init
   sudo archivebox install
   archivebox add 'https://example.com'

   
   
3. Optionally start the server, then open /admin/ on the hostname or IP used to reach ArchiveBox (local example: http://admin.archivebox.localhost:8000/admin/) to create the first admin. If BASE_URL is not configured yet, continue through the same web setup wizard used by Docker installs.

   archivebox server 0.0.0.0:8000
   # completely optional, CLI can always be used without running a server
   # archivebox [subcommand] [--help]
   archivebox help

brew

1. Install Homebrew on your system (if not already installed).
2. Install the ArchiveBox package using brew.

   brew tap archivebox/archivebox
   brew trust archivebox/archivebox
   brew install archivebox
   archivebox version                         # verify the installed version

   See the Install: Bare Metal Wiki for more granular instructions for macOS... ➡️
3. Create a new empty directory and initialize your collection (can be anywhere).

   mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data && cd ~/archivebox/data
   archivebox init
   archivebox install

4. Optionally start the server, then open /admin/ on the hostname or IP used to reach ArchiveBox (local example: http://admin.archivebox.localhost:8000/admin/) to create the first admin. If BASE_URL is not configured yet, continue through the same web setup wizard used by Docker installs.

   archivebox server 0.0.0.0:8000
   # completely optional, CLI can always be used without running a server
   # archivebox [subcommand] [--help]
   archivebox help

   
   

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 uv and Docker channels.

• Arch: yay -S archivebox (contributed by @imlonghao, maintained by @jasongodev)
• FreeBSD: curl -fsSL 'https://get.archivebox.io' | bash (uses uv)
• Nix: nix-env --install archivebox (contributed by @siraben)
• Guix: guix install archivebox (contributed by @rakino)
• More: contribute another distribution...!

docker + electron Desktop App

1. Install Docker on your system (if not already installed).
2. Download a binary release for your OS or build the native app from source
   
   • macOS: ArchiveBox.app.zip
   • Linux: ArchiveBox.deb (alpha: build manually)
   • Windows: ArchiveBox.exe (beta: build manually)

Warning: These are contributed by external volunteers and may lag behind the official Docker and uv channels.

• TrueNAS: Official ArchiveBox TrueChart / Custom App Guide (TrueCharts is discontinued, wait for Electric Eel)
• UnRaid
• Proxmox
• Yunohost
• Cloudron
• Saltbox
• Portainer
• AppImage
• Runtipi
• Umbrel (need contributors...)
• More: contribute another distribution...!

• 
• (USD $29-250/mo, pricing)
• (from USD $2.6/mo)
• (USD $5-50+/mo, 🎗  referral link, instructions)
• (USD $2.5-50+/mo, 🎗  referral link, instructions)
• (USD $10-50+/mo, instructions)
• (USD $0-5+/mo)
• (USD $60-200+/mo)
• (USD $60-200+/mo)

Referral links marked 🎗 provide $5-10 of free credit for new users and help pay for our demo server hosting costs.

For more discussion on third-party hosting options see here: Issue #531.

• Import URLs from some of the supported Input Formats or view the supported Output Formats...
• (Optional) Create a persona and import browser cookies to archive logged-in sites: archivebox persona create --import=chrome personal
• Tweak your UI or archiving behavior Configuration, read about some of the Caveats, or Troubleshoot
• Read about the Dependencies used for archiving, the Upgrading Process, or the Archive Layout on disk...
• Or check out our full Documentation or Community Wiki...

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 --rm archivebox [subcommand] [--help]
docker compose run --rm archivebox help

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

# optional: import your browser cookies into a persona for logged-in archiving
archivebox persona create --import=chrome personal
# supported: chrome/chromium/brave/edge (Chromium-based only)
# use --profile to target a specific profile (e.g. Default, Profile 1)
# re-running import merges/dedupes cookies.txt (by domain/path/name) but replaces chrome_user_data

• 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

# make sure you have uv-installed ArchiveBox and it's available in your $PATH first

# archivebox [subcommand] [--help]
mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data && cd ~/archivebox/data
archivebox init
archivebox install
archivebox add 'https://example.com'
archivebox version           # get archivebox version info + check dependencies
archivebox help              # get list of archivebox subcommands that can be run

# make sure you have `docker-compose.yml` from the Quickstart instructions first

# docker compose run --rm archivebox [subcommand] [--help]
docker compose run --rm archivebox init
docker compose run --rm archivebox install
docker compose run --rm archivebox version
docker compose run --rm archivebox help
docker compose run --rm archivebox add 'https://example.com'
# to start webserver: docker compose up

# make sure you create and cd into in a new empty directory first  

# docker run -it -v $PWD:/data archivebox/archivebox:dev [subcommand] [--help]
docker run -v $PWD:/data -it archivebox/archivebox:dev init
docker run -v $PWD:/data -it archivebox/archivebox:dev install
docker run -v $PWD:/data -it archivebox/archivebox:dev version
docker run -v $PWD:/data -it archivebox/archivebox:dev help
docker run -v $PWD:/data -it archivebox/archivebox:dev add 'https://example.com'
# to start webserver: docker run -v $PWD:/data -it -p 8000:8000 archivebox/archivebox:dev

archivebox shell           # explore the Python library API in a REPL
sqlite3 ./index.sqlite3    # run SQL queries directly on your index
find ./archive/users -path '*/snapshots/*/*/*/index.html'  # inspect snapshot data directly

# Start the server on bare metal (uv/apt/brew):
archivebox server 0.0.0.0:8000                 # start the server

# Or with Docker Compose:
docker compose up                              # start the server

# Or with a Docker container:
docker run -v $PWD:/data -it -p 8000:8000 archivebox/archivebox:dev

Open http://admin.archivebox.localhost:8000/admin/ to create the first admin and finish web setup. Use http://web.archivebox.localhost:8000 for the public UI. ➡️
Advanced: archivebox manage createsuperuser remains available for creating accounts from the CLI.
Set BASE_URL to change the public base domain. The default auto mode uses web. and admin. subdomains on *.localhost, but one host for ordinary DNS names. BIND_ADDR only controls the local listen address.

For more info, see our Usage: Web UI wiki. ➡️

Optional: Change permissions to allow non-logged-in users

archivebox config --set PUBLIC_ADD_VIEW=True   # allow guests to submit URLs 
archivebox config --set PERMISSIONS=public     # make newly added snapshots public
archivebox config --set PUBLIC_INDEX=True      # allow guests to see list of all snapshots
# or
docker compose run --rm archivebox config --set PERMISSIONS=public

# restart the server to apply any config changes

archivebox add --depth=1 'https://example.com'                     # add a URL with uv-installed archivebox on the host
docker compose run --rm archivebox add --depth=1 'https://example.com'                  # or w/ Docker Compose
docker run -it -v $PWD:/data archivebox/archivebox:dev add --depth=1 'https://example.com'  # or w/ Docker, all equivalent

For more info, see our Docker wiki. ➡️

• 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 --depth=1 --plugins=parse_rss_urls "file://$HOME/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:dev add
# if using Docker Compose, add -T when piping stdin / stdout:
# echo 'https://example.com' | docker compose run --rm -T archivebox add

See the Usage: CLI page for documentation and examples.

It also includes a built-in scheduled import feature with archivebox schedule, handled by the same orchestrator that powers archivebox server, so you can pull in URLs from RSS feeds and websites regularly without a separate cron container.

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}/

• Index: index.html & index.json HTML and JSON index files containing metadata and details
• Title, Favicon, Headers Response headers, site favicon, and parsed site title
• SingleFile: singlefile.html HTML snapshot rendered with headless Chrome using SingleFile
• Wget Clone: example.com/page-name.html wget clone of the site with warc/TIMESTAMP.gz
• Chrome Headless
  • PDF: output.pdf Printed PDF of site using headless chrome
  • Screenshot: screenshot.png 1440x900 screenshot of site using headless chrome
  • DOM Dump: output.html DOM Dump of the HTML after rendering using headless chrome
• Article Text: article.html/json Article text extraction using Readability & Mercury
• Archive.org Permalink: archive.org.txt A link to the saved site on archive.org
• Audio & Video: media/ all audio/video files + playlists, including subtitles & metadata w/ yt-dlp
• Source Code: git/ clone of any repository found on GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab links
• More coming soon! See the Roadmap...

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

archivebox config                               # view the entire config
archivebox config --get CHROME_BINARY           # view a specific value

archivebox config --set CHROME_BINARY=chromium  # persist a config using CLI
# OR edit ArchiveBox.conf and add this under its existing [ARCHIVING_CONFIG] section:
CHROME_BINARY=chromium
# OR
env CHROME_BINARY=chromium archivebox version   # run with a one-off config

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

# e.g. archivebox config --set TIMEOUT=120
# or   docker compose run --rm archivebox config --set TIMEOUT=120

TIMEOUT=240                # default: 60    add more seconds on slower networks
CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY=False   # default: True  False = allow saving URLs w/ bad SSL

PUBLIC_INDEX=True          # default: True  whether anon users can view index
PERMISSIONS=public         # default: public visibility for newly added snapshots
PUBLIC_ADD_VIEW=False      # default: False whether anon users can add new URLs

USER_AGENT="Mozilla/5.0 ..."  # change this to get around bot blocking

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.

TIP: For better security while running ArchiveBox, and to avoid polluting your host system with a bunch of sub-dependencies that you need to keep up-to-date,it is strongly recommended to use the ⭐️ official Docker image which provides everything in an easy container with simple one-liner upgrades.

• Language: Python >=3.13
• Backend: Django + Django-Ninja for REST API
• Frontend: Django Admin + Vanilla HTML, CSS, JS
• Web Server: Django + daphne (ASGI)
• Database: Django ORM saving to SQLite3 ./data/index.sqlite3
• Job Queue: Custom orchestrator using supervisord for worker management
• Build/test/lint: uv / pyright+ty+pytest / ruff
• Subdependencies: abxpkg installs apt/brew/pip/npm pkgs at runtime (e.g. yt-dlp, singlefile, readability, git)

These optional subdependencies used for archiving sites include:

• chromium / chrome (for screenshots, PDF, DOM HTML, and headless JS scripts)
• node & npm (for readability, mercury, and singlefile)
• wget (for plain HTML, static files, and WARC saving)
• curl (for fetching headers, favicon, and posting to Archive.org)
• yt-dlp or youtube-dl (for audio, video, and subtitles)
• git (for cloning git repos)
• singlefile (for saving into a self-contained html file)
• postlight/parser (for discussion threads, forums, and articles)
• readability (for articles and long text content)
• and more as we grow...

You don't need to install every dependency by hand. ArchiveBox resolves every extractor dependency through abxpkg: it uses a compatible host installation when one is already available, and otherwise installs and manages the dependency for you.

# install uv + archivebox first (see Quickstart instructions above)

archivebox install     # auto install all the extractors and extras
archivebox --version   # see info and check validity of installed dependencies

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.

• Wiki: Install (Dependencies)
• Wiki: Chromium Install
• Wiki: Upgrading or Merging Archives
• Wiki: Troubleshooting (Installing)

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.

mkdir -p ~/archivebox/data && cd ~/archivebox/data   # just an example, can be anywhere
archivebox init

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). Snapshot data is organized by user, date, domain, and UUID under data/archive/users/.

data/
    index.sqlite3
    ArchiveBox.conf
    archive/
        1617687755 -> users/admin/snapshots/20210406/example.com/SNAPSHOT_UUID/
        users/
            admin/
                snapshots/
                    20210406/
                        example.com/
                            SNAPSHOT_UUID/
                                index.html
                                index.jsonl
                                screenshot/screenshot.png
                                ytdlp/media/some_video.mp4
                                wget/warc/example.com.warc.gz
                                git/somerepo.git
                                ...

Each snapshot subfolder includes static metadata and plain extractor output files. ArchiveBox also maintains a backwards-compatible data/archive/TIMESTAMP symlink for each snapshot.

• Wiki: Setting Up Storage (SMB, NFS, S3, B2, Google Drive, etc.)
• Wiki: Usage (Disk Layout)
• Wiki: Usage (Large Archives)
• Wiki: Security Overview (Output Folder)
• Wiki: Publishing Your Archive
• Wiki: Upgrading or Merging Archives

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

NOTE: These exports are not paginated, exporting many URLs or the entire archive at once may be slow. Use the filtering CLI flags on the archivebox list command to export specific Snapshots or ranges.

# archivebox list --help
archivebox list --html --with-headers > index.html     # export to static html table
archivebox list --json --with-headers > index.json     # export to json blob
archivebox list --csv=timestamp,url,title > index.csv  # export to csv spreadsheet

# (if using Docker Compose, add the -T flag when piping)
# docker compose run --rm -T archivebox list --html 'https://example.com' > index.html

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.

• Wiki: Publishing Your Archive (Exporting as Static HTML)
• Wiki: Security Overview (Publishing)
• Wiki: Configuration (PERMISSIONS, PUBLIC_INDEX, PUBLIC_ADD_VIEW)

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.

# don't save private content to ArchiveBox, e.g.:
archivebox add 'https://docs.google.com/document/d/12345somePrivateDocument'
archivebox add 'https://vimeo.com/somePrivateVideo'

# restrict the main index, Snapshot content, and Add Page to authenticated users as-needed:
archivebox config --set PUBLIC_INDEX=False
archivebox config --set PERMISSIONS=private
archivebox config --set PUBLIC_ADD_VIEW=False
archivebox manage createsuperuser

CAUTION: Assume anyone viewing your archives will be able to see any cookies, session tokens, or private URLs passed to ArchiveBox during archiving. Make sure to secure your ArchiveBox data and don't share snapshots with others without stripping out sensitive headers and content first.

• Wiki: Publishing Your Archive
• Wiki: Security Overview
• Wiki: Chromium Install (Setting Up a User Profile)
• Wiki: Personas (browser profiles and cookies)
• Wiki: Configuration (DEFAULT_PERSONA)

Archived JavaScript is untrusted content. The default SERVER_SECURITY_MODE=auto uses isolated subdomains with full replay on *.localhost, and a one-domain no-JS replay policy on ordinary public or LAN hostnames. Choose safe-subdomains-fullreplay only when wildcard DNS and TLS are configured. See the Security Overview and Issue #239 for details.

# Explicit wildcard mode: full replay on isolated snapshot subdomains
archivebox config --set SERVER_SECURITY_MODE=safe-subdomains-fullreplay

# Alternative for deployments without wildcard subdomains: disable JS replay
archivebox config --set SERVER_SECURITY_MODE=safe-onedomain-nojsreplay

NOTE: Only the wget & dom extractor methods execute archived JS when viewing snapshots, all other archive methods produce static output that does not execute JS on viewing.
If you do not need JavaScript-capable replay at all, you can also disable those extractors with:
archivebox config --set WGET_ENABLED=False DOM_ENABLED=False.

• Wiki: Security Overview
• ArchiveBox Github Issue: #239
• Security Advisory: CVE-2023-45815
• Wiki: Security Overview (Publishing)

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.

• Set CHROME_USER_AGENT, WGET_USER_AGENT, CURL_USER_AGENT to impersonate a real browser (by default, ArchiveBox reveals that it's a bot when using the default user agent settings)
• Set up a logged-in browser session for archiving by importing a dedicated browser profile into a persona
• Rewrite your URLs before archiving to swap in alternative frontends that are more bot-friendly e.g.
  reddit.com/some/url -> teddit.net/some/url: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

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.

ArchiveBox can preserve multiple snapshots of the same URL. The default ONLY_NEW=True skips URLs already in the collection; use --no-only-new when you intentionally want another snapshot.

Each re-archive creates a distinct Snapshot row for the same URL:

archivebox add 'https://example.com'
archivebox add --no-only-new 'https://example.com'

The button in the Admin UI performs the same explicit re-archive.

• ArchiveBox Issues: #179
• Wiki: Usage (Explanation of Web UI Buttons)

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.

• ArchiveBox can use anywhere from ~1gb per 1000 Snapshots, to ~50gb per 1000 Snapshots, mostly dependent on whether you're saving video/audio using YTDLP_ENABLED=True and whether you lower YTDLP_MAX_SIZE=750m.
• Disk usage can be reduced by using a compressed/deduplicated filesystem like ZFS/BTRFS, or by turning off extractors methods you don't need. You can also deduplicate content with a tool like fdupes or rdfind.
• Don't store large collections on older filesystems like EXT3/FAT as they may not be able to handle more than 50k directory entries in the data/archive/ folder.
• Try to keep the data/index.sqlite3 file on local drive (not a network mount) or SSD for maximum performance, however the data/archive/ folder can be on a network mount or slower HDD.
• If using Docker or NFS/SMB/FUSE for the data/archive/ folder, make sure the mounted data directory is writable by its intended owner and consider disabling root_squash on your fileshare server.

• Wiki: Usage (Disk Layout)
• Wiki: Security Overview (Output-Folder)
• Wiki: Usage (Large Archives)
• Wiki: Security Overview (Privilege Dropping)

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.

Image from Perma.cc...

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 software 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 counsel if you plan to host a public instance (start by putting your DMCA/GDPR contact info in FOOTER_INFO and placing branding overrides in your collection's fixed custom_templates/ directory).

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 capacity to 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.

• Community Wiki
  • Web Archiving Software
    List of ArchiveBox alternatives and open source projects in the internet archiving space.
  • Awesome-Web-Archiving Lists
    Community-maintained indexes of archiving tools and institutions like iipc/awesome-web-archiving.
  • Reading List
    Articles, posts, and blogs relevant to ArchiveBox and web archiving in general.
  • Communities
    A collection of the most active internet archiving communities and initiatives.
• Check out the ArchiveBox Roadmap and Changelog
• Learn why archiving the internet is important by reading the "On the Importance of Web Archiving" blog post.
• Reach out to me for questions and comments via @ArchiveBoxApp or @theSquashSH on Twitter

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.

• Quickstart
• Install
• Docker
• Usage
• Configuration
• Supported Sources
• Supported Outputs
• Scheduled Archiving

• Security Overview
• Cookies & Sessions Setup (archiving sites that require logins)
• Setting up the Search Backends (choosing ripgrep, Sonic, or FTS5)
• Setting up Local/Remote Storages (S3/B2/Google Drive/SMB/NFS/etc.)
• Setting up Authentication & Permissions (SSO/LDAP/OAuth/API Keys/etc.)
• Publishing Your Archive (sharing your archive server with others)
• Chromium Install Options (installing and configuring ArchiveBox's Chrome)
• Upgrading or Merging Archives
• Troubleshooting

• Developer Documentation
• Python API
• REST API (alpha)

• Bug Tracker
• Roadmap
• Changelog
• Donations
• Background & Motivation
• Web Archiving Community

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/dev/apidocs/

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

First make sure you have uv installed: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/

git clone https://github.com/ArchiveBox/monorepo
cd monorepo
./bin/setup.sh

# activate the monorepo venv, then cd into archivebox
source .venv/bin/activate
cd archivebox

Repos included in monorepo setup:

• https://github.com/ArchiveBox/abxbus
• https://github.com/ArchiveBox/abxpkg
• https://github.com/ArchiveBox/abx-plugins
• https://github.com/ArchiveBox/abx-dl
• https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox

# Install ArchiveBox runtime dependencies
mkdir -p data && cd data
archivebox init
archivebox install         # detect and install all extractor dependencies

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

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

# 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
docker run -it -v $PWD/data:/data archivebox/archivebox:dev install

# 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 server --debug --reload 0.0.0.0:8000

# 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'.

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.

# 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 server --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

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

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 uv:
uv tool install --python 3.13 --upgrade 'git+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox.git@dev'
archivebox install

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

(uses ruff, pyright, ty, and pytest -s)

# generate the database migrations after changes to models.py
archivebox manage 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
uv run --with pydot --with 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
uv run --with pyyaml archivebox manage print_settings --format=yaml

# 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
# ensure django-tui is in INSTALLED_APPS: core/settings.py
uv run --with django-tui archivebox manage tui

• https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/command_extensions.html
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1074212/how-can-i-see-the-raw-sql-queries-django-is-running
• https://github.com/anze3db/django-tui (explore manage.py commands as TUI)
• https://github.com/bloomberg/memray (advanced python profiler)
• https://github.com/laixintao/flameshow (display flamegraphs in terminal)
• https://github.com/taliraj/django-migrations-tui (explore migrations as TUI)

Extractors are maintained in a separate repo here: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/abx-plugins (included in monorepo setup).

Copy a similar plugin as a template to modify, then open a new PR to add it in that repo.

(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

• ArchiveBox.io Website / ArchiveBox Github (Source Code) / ArchiveBox Demo Server
• Documentation (Github Wiki) / API Reference Docs (ReadTheDocs) / Roadmap / Changelog
• Bug Tracker (Github Issues) / Discussions (Github Discussions) / Community Chat Forum (Zulip)
• Find us on social media: Twitter @ArchiveBoxApp, LinkedIn, YouTube, SaaSHub, Alternative.to, Reddit

         
ArchiveBox operates as a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit FSP (sponsored by HCB), direct donations are tax-deductible.

   

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