**ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites (it saves HTML, JS, media files, PDFs, images and more).**
You can use it to preserve access to websites you care about by storing them locally offline. ArchiveBox imports lists of URLs, renders the pages in a headless, autheticated, user-scriptable browser, and then archives the content in multiple redundant common formats (HTML, PDF, PNG, WARC) that will last long after the originals disappear off the internet. It automatically extracts assets and media from pages and saves them in easily-accessible folders, with out-of-the-box support for extracting git repositories, audio, video, subtitles, images, PDFs, and more.
Simply download the repo, then run the `./archive < urls` command each time you want to import new links and update your archive `./output` HTML folder. ArchiveBox is written in Python 3 and uses wget, Chrome headless, youtube-dl, pywb, and other common unix tools to save each page you add in multiple redundant formats.
It doesn't require a constantly running server or backend, just open the generated `output/index.html` in a browser to view the archive. It can import and export links as JSON (among other formats), so it's easy to script or hook up to other APIs. If you run it on a schedule and import from browser history or bookmarks regularly, you can sleep soundly knowing that the slice of the internet you care about will be automatically preserved in multiple, durable long-term formats that will be accessible for decades (or longer).
ArchiveBox has [3 main dependencies](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Install#dependencies) beyond `python3`: `wget`, `chromium`, and `youtube-dl`.
To get started, you can [install them manually](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Install) using your system's package manager, use the [automated helper script](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Quickstart), or use the official [Docker](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Docker) container. All three dependencies are optional if [disabled](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration#archive-method-toggles) in settings.
For more information, see the [full Quickstart guide](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Quickstart), [Usage](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Usage), and [Configuration](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration) docs.
*(`pip install archivebox` will be available in the near future, follow our [Roadmap](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Roadmap) for progress)*
ArchiveBox imports a list of URLs from stdin, remote URL, or file, then adds the pages to a local archive folder using wget to create a browsable HTML clone, youtube-dl to extract media, and a full instance of Chrome headless for PDF, Screenshot, and DOM dumps, and more...
Using multiple methods and the market-dominant browser to execute JS ensures we can save even the most complex, finicky websites in at least a few high-quality, long-term data formats.
Archiving is additive so you can schedule `./archive` to [run regularly](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Scheduled-Archiving) and pull new links into the index. For each link, it saves the first succesful snapshot (it will retry any that failed on the next run). Support for saving multiple snapshots of each site over time will be added soon (along with the ability to view diffs of the changes between runs).
All the archived links are stored by date bookmarked in `output/archive/<timestamp>`, and everything is indexed nicely with JSON & HTML files. The intent is for all the content to be viewable with common software in 50 - 100 years without needing to run ArchiveBox in a VM.
-<imgsrc="https://nicksweeting.com/images/bookmarks.png"height="22px"/> Browser history or bookmarks exports (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera, and more)
It does everything out-of-the-box by default, but you can disable or tweak [individual archive methods](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration) via environment variables or config file.
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.
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.
<imgsrc="https://i.imgur.com/4nkFjdv.png"width="10%"align="left"/> The aim of ArchiveBox is to go beyond what the Wayback Machine and other public archiving services can do, by adding a headless browser to replay sessions accurately, and by automatically extracting all the content in multiple redundant formats that will survive being passed down to historians and archivists through many generations.
ArchiveBox differentiates itself from [similar projects](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community#Web-Archiving-Projects) by being simple, one-shot CLI inferface for users to ingest builk feeds of URLs over extended periods, as opposed to being a backend service that ingests individual, manually-submitted URLs from a web UI.
#### Private Local Archives vs Centralized Public Archives
Unlike crawler software that starts from a seed URL and works outwards, or public tools like Archive.org designed for users to manually submit links from the public internet, ArchiveBox tries to be a set-and-forget archiver suitable for archiving your entire browsing history, RSS feeds, or bookmarks, including private/authenticated content that you wouldn't otherwise share with a centralized service.
Because ArchiveBox is designed to ingest a firehose of browser history and bookmark feeds to a local disk, it can be much more disk-space intensive than a centralized service like the Internet Archive or Archive.today. However, as storage space gets cheaper and compression improves, you should be able to use it continuously over the years without having to delete anything. In my experience, ArchiveBox uses about 5gb per 1000 articles, but your milage may vary depending on which options you have enabled and what types of sites you're archiving. By default, it archives everything in as many formats as possible, meaning it takes more space than a using a single method, but more content is accurately replayable over extended periods of time. Storage requirements can be reduced by using a compressed/deduplicated filesystem like ZFS/BTRFS, or by setting `FETCH_MEDIA=False` to skip audio & video files.
An alternative tool [pywb](https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb) allows you to run a browser through an archiving proxy which records all traffic to WARC files. ArchiveBox intends to natively support live proxy-archiving using `pywb` in the future, but for now it only ingests chunks of links at a time via browser history, bookmarks, RSS, etc.
Whether you want learn which organizations are the big players in the web archiving space, want to find a specific open source tool for your web archiving need, or just want to see where archivists hang out online, our Community Wiki page serves as an index of the broader web archiving community. Check it out to learn about some of the coolest web archiving projects and communities on the web!
*A collection of the most active internet archiving communities and initiatives.*
- Check out the ArchiveBox [Roadmap](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Roadmap) and [Changelog](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Changelog)
- Learn why archiving the internet is important by reading the "[On the Importance of Web Archiving](https://parameters.ssrc.org/2018/09/on-the-importance-of-web-archiving/)" blog post.
- Or reach out to me for questions and comments via [@theSquashSH](https://twitter.com/thesquashSH) on Twitter.
<sub><i>This project is maintained mostly in <ahref="https://nicksweeting.com/blog#About">my spare time</a> with the help from generous contributors.</i></sub>
