Passively capture, archive, and hoard your web browsing history, including the contents of the pages you visit, for later offline viewing, replay, mirroring, data scraping, and/or indexing. Your own personal private Wayback Machine that can also archive HTTP POST
requests and responses, as well as most other HTTP
-level data.
Hoardy-Web
?Hoardy-Web
is a suite of tools that helps you to passively capture, archive, and hoard your web browsing history. Not just the URLs, but also the contents and the requisite resources (images, media, CSS
, fonts, etc) of the pages you visit. Not just the last 3 months, but from the beginning of time you start using it.
Practically speaking, you install Hoardy-Web
’s extension/add-on into your web browser and just browse the web normally while it passively, in background, captures and archives HTTP
requests and responses your web browser does in the process. The extension has a lot configuration options to help you tweak what should or should not be archived, provides indicators that can help you fully capture each page you do want to archive (it can notify you when some parts of a page failed to load in various ways), and has a very low memory footprint, keeping you browsing experience snappy even on ancient hardware (unless you explicitly configure it to do otherwise to, e.g., minimize writes to disk instead).
You can then view, replay, mirror, scrape, and/or index your archived data later by using Hoardy-Web
’s own tool set, by plugging these tools into others, and/or by parsing and processing its outputs with your own tools.
Hoardy-Web
was previously known as “Personal Private Passive Web Archive” aka “pwebarc”.
Hoardy-Web
is for?Do you happen to use your browser’s open tabs as a “To Read Later” list?
Isn’t it kind of annoying you have to re-fetch web pages in old tabs after your browser unloads them, you restart it, or you reboot your PC?
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a tool that would allow you to view your old tabs, instantly, even if your browser unloaded them, without re-loading anything from the Internet, re-loading previously captured states from disk instead, making things both more convenient (since you can now read those old tabs on a plane, or at sea) and more private (since the origin web servers will not learn about you returning to an old tab).
Have you ever wanted to re-visit a web page you visited awhile ago, but then discovered that that page no longer exists, and Wayback Machine did not save any visits to it, or it only has versions that do not contain the information you need?
How many web pages you visited today you could potentially need to re-visit in the future, in their current versions?
What proportion of them won’t ever be archived by the Wayback Machine or any similar archiving service (because those pages are hidden behind CAPTCHAs, authentications, paywalls, HTTP POST
s, etc), is not versioned by the origin website (e.g. Wikipedia), is not archived by Wayback Machine currently, or only have outdated versions there? (The latter you can count by substituting those <URL>
s into https://web.archive.org/web/2/<URL>
and trying the result out.)
Now, what, do you think, is the probability that the origin website and/or Wayback Machine would remove any of those pages in the future? (I.e., are those pages potentially politically or commercially sensitive? Would somebody benefit if they were removed? Pages like that vanish both from Wikipedia — where pages can be deleted with their edit history — and from Wayback Machine — where host owners can simply request their websites to be deleted from history — all the time.)
Now multiply all those values. That’s, on average, how many useful pages you unrecoverably lost today.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a tool that would allow you to automatically and efficiently archive everything your browser fetches from the network while you surf the web, allowing you to search and replay captured versions of previously visited web pages later.
Do you frequently find yourself making custom website data scrapers, for accessibility and/or data extraction reasons?
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply visit those websites with your web browser, record all HTTP
requests and responses performed in the process, and then, possibly years later, reuse those captures as inputs to your data scraping pipelines.
Hoardy-Web
does this, and more, but mainly this.
If you are running multiple browsers or browser profiles to isolate different browsing sessions from each other, and you now want to introduce some historic persistence into your setup, then Hoardy-Web
is for you.
If you are not already isolating browsing sessions, however, then introducing Hoardy-Web
into your setup, in the long run, will probably be a liability. In which case, Hoardy-Web
is not for you, navigate away, please.
If you are reading this on GitHub, be aware that this repository is a mirror of a repository on the author’s web site. In author’s humble opinion, the rendering of the documentation pages there is superior to what can be seen on GitHub (its implemented via pandoc
there).
With Hoardy-Web
, technically speaking, capture, archival, and replay are all independent. This allows Hoardy-Web
to be used in rather complex setups. When all the pieces are used together, however, they integrate into a rather smooth workflow, demonstrated below.
So, for illustrative purposes, I added the Hoardy-Web
extension to a new browser profile in my Firefox, started a hoardy-web serve
archiving server instance, ensured the extension is running in Submit dumps via 'HTTP'
mode and its Server URL
setting points to my hoardy-web serve
instance (like this screenshot of the P&R
tab shows), and then visited a Wikipedia page:
Also note that, for illustrative purposes, I had enabled limbo mode before visiting it so that Hoardy-Web
would capture that page and all its requisite resources and then put them all into “limbo” instead of immediately archiving them, thus allowing me to look at the page first. This is most useful for when you are about to visit a new page and you are not yet sure you will want to archive that visit. Or for dynamically generated pages that update all the time with only some versions deserving being archived.
So, then, I decided I do want to save that page and its resources. Hence, I pressed the lower of “In limbo” check-mark buttons there to collect and archive everything from that tab to my hoardy-web serve
archiving server instance.
Then, I pressed the “Replay” button to switch to a replay page generated by hoardy-web serve
for the above capture (i.e. that button re-navigated that tab to http://127.0.0.1:3210/web/2/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliometrics, which hoardy-web serve
then immediately redirected to the latest archived replay version of that URL):
… and closed the browser.
(Also, when not doing this for illustrative purposes, in practice, the above series of actions usually takes less than a second, via keyboard shortcuts, which Hoardy-Web
has in abundance. Note how the tooltip on the above screenshot shows which shortcut that action is currently bound to.)
Then, later, I reopened my browser, restored the last session, and that tab was restored back with zero requests to the Internet.
Now note that Hoardy-Web
also has a button (the one with the “eject” symbol on the “Globally” line) which re-navigates all open tabs that do not yet point to replay pages — excluding those for which Include in global replays
per-tab setting is disabled — to their replays.
That is, you can use Hoardy-Web
to implement the following browser workflow:
You re-navigate most of your tabs to their replays and allow the browser to unload them as it pleases.
You refer back to those tabs at future times, like usual, but now, with Hoardy-Web
, you no longer need to worry about those tabs being unloaded and later reloaded while you experience
intermittent Internet connection issues, like when on a plane or at sea;
the original website going down exactly when you want to refer back to it;
the page in question becoming unpublished, removed, edited, or censored;
all those web servers learning that you use your browser’s tabs as a “To Read Later” list and you just selected that old tab to start reading.
After all, with Hoardy-Web
, re-loading an old replayed tab won’t load anything from the Internet.
If you feel like you have too many open tabs, you can simply bookmark and close some of them, re-open them later, and get the exact version of the page you bookmarked.
You don’t even need to use your browser’s own bookmark machinery for this. Put those URLs into your org-mode files or some such and return to them later as you please.
You can now quit your browser, crash your OS, let your PC loose power, and then get back all those tabs exactly as you left them off, even if the Internet is currently down. Simply restore your last browsing session.
This is simply a superior way to live.
Now, assuming you’ve been using Hoardy-Web
for a while, capturing and archiving a bunch of stuff, you can now also use hoardy-web
command-line interface to query and process your archived data in various ways. For instance:
You can generate a static offline website mirror from (a subset of) your archives:
hoardy-web mirror --to ~/hoardy-web/mirror-ao3 \
--root-url-prefix 'https://archiveofourown.org/' \
~/hoardy-web/raw
producing a bunch of interlinked HTML
, CSS
, images, and other files.
You can then share them by putting those results onto a private HTTP
server and sharing a link. Or just zip
them and share the resulting file.
Or, can you can sync that ~/hoardy-web/mirror-ao3
directory to your phone with adb push
, syncthing, or some such, and then read/listen them with a e-book reading app there.
(There is a ton of website-specific alternatives to this — like, for example, specifically archiveofourown.org
provides EPUB
downloads for its fiction pages, which might be more convenient in some cases — but a combination of hoardy-web
with syncthing
(or some such) will work for all and any websites, and can be completely automated.)
Or, you can feed those files to recoll or some such to get full-text search.
Alternatively, you can use some ready-made scripts distributed with hoardy-web
to
view archived HTML
documents via pandoc
piped into less
in your favorite tty emulator,
listen their contents with a TTS engine via spd-say
,
open files stored inside those dumps via xdg-open
(so, e.g., you can view images stored inside without first running hoardy-web mirror
),
etc.
Or, you can use hoardy-web get
and run
sub-commands to make your own scripts for processing archived web pages and files in arbitrary ways.
Or, you can use hoardy-web find
to find paths of dumps matching a specified criteria and then parse the original CBOR
-formatted WRR
files yourself with readily-available libraries.
Then, suddenly, you feel a need to see the list of the last 10 domains you visited that used CloudFlare:
Or, say, you just encountered a very uncooperative web app that does various tricks to prevent you from inspecting its web traffic in browser’s Network Monitor (it’s not hard to fingerprint you using it), but you want to inspect JSON RPC
calls it does anyway:
The possibilities are, essentially, endless.
At the moment, Hoardy-Web
tool set consists of the following pieces, all developed simultaneously in this repository.
Hoardy-Web
WebExtensions browser add-on… which can capture all HTTP
requests and responses (and DOM
snapshots, i.e. the contents of the page after all JavaScript
was run) your browser fetches, dump them into WRR
format, and then archives those dumps
into browser’s local storage (the default),
into files saved to your local file system (by generating fake-Downloads containing bundles of WRR
-formatted dumps),
to a self-hosted archiving server (like the archival+replay hoardy-web serve
or the trivial archival-only hoardy-web-sas
described below),
any combination of the above.
That is, the Hoardy-Web
browser extension can be used independently of other tools developed here. You can install it and start saving your browsing history immediately, and then delay learning to use the rest for later.
Also, unless configured otherwise, the extension will dump and archive collected data immediately, to both prevent data loss and to free the used RAM as soon as possible, keeping your browsing experience snappy even on ancient hardware.
The extension can be run under
Firefox, Tor Browser, LibreWolf, and other Firefox-based browsers;
Fenix aka Firefox for Android, Fennec, Mull, and other Fenix-based browsers;
Chromium, Google Chrome, Ungoogled Chromium, Brave, and other Chromium-based browsers.
(See the gallery for screenshots).
Note, however, that while Hoardy-Web
works under Chromium-based browsers, users of those browsers will have a worse experience, both with Hoardy-Web
and with its alternatives, because
Hoardy-Web
uses many of the same browser APIs as ad-blocking extensions, and Google is doing its best to make those APIs unusable;
hence, on Chromium-based browsers, Hoardy-Web
(and its alternatives) have to use various debugging APIs instead, which are rather flaky;
also, Google dislikes tools like Hoardy-Web
and specifically forbids extensions that “enable unauthorized download of streaming content or media” from being hosted on Chrome Web Store;
yes, this makes absolutely no technical sense, all “streaming content” is “downloaded” before being played, you can’t both “authorize” a streaming and “unauthorize” its download, but that is what Chrome Web Store’s “Terms of Use” say;
the latter is especially true for Hoardy-Web
since, unlike most of its alternatives, it does not generate any requests itself, it only captures the data that a web page generates while you browse it.
¯\(◉◡◔)/¯
The extension does, however, try its best to collect all web traffic you browser generates. Therefore, it can
trivially archive web pages hidden behind CAPTCHAs, requiring special cookies, multi-factor logins, paywalls, anti-scraping/curl
/wget
measures, and etc (after all, the website in question only interacts with your normal web browser, not with a custom web crawler);
archive most HTTP
-level data, not just web pages, and not just things available via HTTP GET
requests (e.g., it can archive answer pages of web search engines fetched via HTTP POST
, AJAX
data, JSON RPC
calls, etc; though, at the moment, it can not archive WebSockets
data);
all the while
See the “Quirks and Bugs” section of extension’s Help
page for known issues.
Nevertheless, capture-wise, the extension appears to be stable. However, the UI and additional features are being tweaked continuously at the moment. Also, Hoardy-Web
is tested much less on Chromium than on Firefox.
hoardy-web
tool… which does a bunch of stuff, to quote from there:
hoardy-web
is a tool to inspect, search, organize, programmatically extract values and generate static website mirrors from, archive, view, and replayHTTP
archives/dumps inWRR
(“Web Request+Response”, produced by theHoardy-Web
Web Extension browser add-on, also on GitHub) andmitmproxy
(mitmdump
) file formats.
With the hoardy-web
tool, you can view your archived data by:
replaying your archives over HTTP
with hoardy-web serve
sub-command, similar to Wayback Machine, heritrix, and pywb;
generating local offline static website mirrors with hoardy-web mirror
sub-command, similar to wget -mpk
(wget --mirror --page-requisites --convert-links
);
except hoardy-web mirror
has a ton of cool options wget
does not (e.g. it can scrub
generated pages in various ways, de-duplicate the files it generates, including between different websites and different generated mirrors, etc), and should you discover you dislike the generated result for some reason, you can change some or all of those options and re-generate the mirror without re-downloading anything;
using one of the ready-made scripts; or
making you own scripts built on top of hoardy-web
.
hoardy-web serve
can also play a role of an advanced archiving server for the Hoardy-Web
browser extension. I.e., it can do archival, replay, or both at the same time.
hoardy-web
allows you to search your archives
hoardy-web serve
by using glob-URL links like http://127.0.0.1:3210/web/*/https://archiveofourown.org/works/[0-9]*, a-la Wayback Machine;hoardy-web find
or hoardy-web stream
sub-commands.Also note that
most sub-commands of hoardy-web
tool can do full-text search via the --*grep*
options;
though, at the moment, it’s rather slow since there is no built-in full-text indexing;
you can, however, full-text index you data by hoardy-web mirror
ing it first and then feeding the result to an arbitrary desktop search engine, or by using hoardy-web get
as a filter for recoll;
with a bit of CLI hackery, you can also make hoardy-web stream
generate links to http://127.0.0.1:3210/web/*/* pages matching arbitrary criteria.
hoardy-web
tool is deep in its beta stage. At the moment, it does about 85% of the stuff I want it to do, and the things it does it does not do as well as I’d like.
See the TODO list for more info.
hoardy-web-sas
simple archiving server… which simply dumps everything the Hoardy-Web
extension submits to it to disk, one file per HTTP
request+response.
This is useful in case when you can’t or do not want to use the fully-featured hoardy-web serve
. E.g., say, you want to stick it onto a Raspberry Pi
or something. Or if you are feeling paranoid and want to archive data from a browser which must not have any replay capability. Or if you want archival and replay to be done by separate processes.
The simple archiving server is stable (it’s so simple there hardly could be any bugs there).
… to allow Hoardy-Web
extension to collect request POST
data as-is.
This is not required and even without that patch Hoardy-Web
will collect everything in most cases, but it could be useful if you want to correctly capture POST
requests that upload files.
See the “Quirks and Bugs” section of extension’s Help
page for more info.
Hoardy-Web
is most similar to?In essence, Hoardy-Web
tool set allows you to setup your own personal private Wayback Machine which
HTTP POST
requests and responses, and most other HTTP
-level data,Compared to most of its alternatives, Hoardy-Web
DOES NOT:
force you to use a Chromium-based browser, which is not a small thing, since if you tried using any of the close alternatives running under Chromium-based browsers, you might have noticed that the experience there is pretty awful: the browser becomes even slower than usual, large files don’t get captured, random stuff fails to be captured at random times because Chromium randomly detaches its debugger from its tabs… none of these problems exist on Firefox-based browsers;
require you to capture, collect, and archive recorded data one page/browsing session at a time (the default behaviour is to archive everything completely automatically, though it implements optional limbo mode which delays archival of collected data and provides optional manual/semi-automatic control if you want it);
require you to download the data you want to archive twice or more (you’d be surprised how commonly other tools will either ask you to do that explicitly, or just do that silently when you ask them to save something);
send any of your data anywhere (unless you explicitly configure it to do so);
send any telemetry anywhere;
require you to store all the things in browser’s local storage where they can vanish at any moment (though, saving to local storage is the default because it simplifies on-boarding, but switching to another archival method takes a couple of clicks and re-archival of old data from browser’s local storage to elsewhere is easy);
require you to run a database server;
require you to run a web browser to view the data you’ve already archived.
Technically, the Hoardy-Web
project is most similar to
Hoardy-Web
leaves SSL/TLS layer alone and hooks into browser’s runtime instead, and its tooling is designed primarily for web archival purposes, not traffic inspection and protocol reverse-engineering;In fact, an unpublished and now irrelevant ancestor project of Hoardy-Web
was a tool to generate website mirrors from mitmproxy
stream captures. (If you want that, hoardy-web
tool can do that for you. It can take mitmproxy
dumps as inputs.) But then I got annoyed by all the sites that don’t work under mitmproxy
, did some research into the alternatives, decided there were none I wanted to use, and so I started adding stuff to my tool until it became Hoardy-Web
.
For more info see the list of comparisons to alternatives.
Yes, as of December 2024, I archive all of my web traffic using Hoardy-Web
, without any interruptions, since October 2023. Before that my preferred tool was mitmproxy.
After adding each new feature to the hoardy-web
tool, as a rule, I feed at least the last 5 years of my web browsing into it (at the moment, most of it converted from other formats to .wrr
, obviously) to see if everything works as expected.
Hoardy-Web
browser extension/add-onOn Firefox, Tor Browser, LibreWolf, Fenix aka Firefox for Android, Fennec, Mull, etc:
Alternatively, see Installing on Firefox-based browser.
On Chromium, Google Chrome, Ungoogled Chromium, Brave, etc:
This requires a bit more work than clicking Install
button on Chrome Web Store because Google does not want you to run extensions like Hoardy-Web
and forbids them from being hosted there (see the “enables the unauthorized download of streaming content or media” clause).
Quite understandable, after all Hoardy-Web
does make it very hard to continue deluding yourself that “streaming content” and “downloaded content” are not exactly the same thing.
Alternatively, build it from source.
Now load any web page in your browser. The extension will report if everything works okay, or tell you where the problem is if something is broken.
Assuming the extension reported success: Congratulations! You are now collecting and archiving all your web browsing traffic originating from that browser. Repeat extension installation for all browsers/browser profiles as needed.
Technically speaking, if you just want to collect everything and don’t have time to figure out how to use the rest of this suite of tools right this moment, you can stop here and figure out how to use the rest of this suite later.
Except, be sure to see “Setup recommendations” below, since installing Hoardy-Web
into a browser where you login into things, and then not configuring it properly, can make you more vulnerable.
It took me about 6 months before I had to refer back to previously archived data for the first time when I started using mitmproxy to sporadically collect my HTTP
traffic in 2017. So, I recommend you start collecting immediately and be lazy about the rest.
(Also, I learned a lot about nefarious things some of the websites I visit do in background by inspecting the logs Hoardy-Web
produces. You’d be surprised how many big websites generate HTTP
requests with evil tracking data at the moment you close the containing tab. They do this because such requests can’t be captured and inspected with browser’s own Network Monitor, so most people are completely unaware.)
Submit dumps via 'HTTP'
modeIn practice, though, your will probably want to install the hoardy-web
tool and run hoardy-web serve
archiving server, then, switch Hoardy-Web
to Submit dumps via 'HTTP'
mode, and then enjoy safe persistent archival with replay and search, like on the screenshots above.
Or, alternatively, you might want to use the hoardy-web-sas
simple archiving server instead.
Technically speaking, archiving methods other than Submit dumps via 'HTTP'
are all unsafe, since you can lose some or all of your archived data if your disk ever gets out of space, or if you accidentally uninstall the Hoardy-Web
extension, or mis-click a button in your browser’s UI.
Alternatively, you can use the combination of archiving by saving of data to browser’s local storage (the default) followed by semi-manual export into WRR
bundles.
Or, alternatively, you can switch to Export dumps via 'saveAs'
mode by default and simply accept the resulting slightly more annoying UI (on Firefox, it can be fixed with a small about:config
change) and slight unsafety.
Which is most useful when using Hoardy-Web
under Tor Browser or similar.
Install everything by running
Test the results work:
Also, instead of installing the add-on from addons.mozilla.org
or from Releases on GitHub you can take freshly built XPI and Chromium ZIPs from
instead. See the extension’s README for more info on how to install them manually.
It’s highly recommended to make a new browser profile specifically for archived anonymous browsing.
Run Firefox as firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager
to get to the appropriate UI. On Windows you can just edit your desktop or toolbar shortcut to target
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -ProfileManager
or similar by default to switch between profiles on browser startup.
Or just use different browsers for this, e.g. LibreWolf for anonymous browsing, Firefox for logged-in.
Then, set the “anonymous” browser profile to always run in Private Browsing
mode to prevent login persistence there.
Then, in Hoardy-Web
, either
set different extension instances to use different default Bucket
values;
or, alternatively, in a more paranoid setup, point them to separate archiving server instances dumping data to different directories on disk.
If you do accidentally login in “anonymous” profile, move those dumps out of the “anonymous” directory immediately.
This way, in the future, you can easily share dumps from the “anonymous” instance without worrying about leaking your private data or login credentials.
In a logged-in browser/profile you should probably disable capture by default, or enable “limbo” mode and disable Stash 'collected' reqres into local storage
. Then, you should probably perform actual logins in separate tabs, the collected data of which you then discard.
This way, no login credentials will get accidentally saved by Hoardy-Web
.
You can add hoardy-web serve
/hoardy-web-sas
to Autorun or start it from your ~/.xsession
, systemd --user
, etc.
After you’ve installed all the parts you want to use, you should read:
The Hoardy-Web
extension’s Help
page for a long detailed description of what the extension does step-by-step.
It is a must-read, though instead of reading that file raw I highly recommend you read it by pressing the Help
button in extension’s UI, since doing that will make the whole thing pretty interactive, see the screenshot gallery for screenshots of how this will look.
In there, especially see:
the “Frequently Asked Questions” section for the answers to the frequently asked questions, including those about common quirks you can encounter while using it; and
the “Quirks and Bugs” section for more info on quirks and limitations of Hoardy-Web
when used on different browsers.
The hoardy-web
’s README
and/or the hoardy-web-sas
’s README
.
The former of which has a bunch of advanced usage examples.
Also, you might want to see hoardy-web
’s example scripts.
Then, to follow the development:
See the “Changelog” page for the progress log and human-readable description of recent changes (which is much shorter and more comprehensible than the commit log).
You can simply bookmark that URL and return to it periodically to follow new releases.
Alternatively, you can also read that page from extension’s UI by pressing the button labeled with extension’s version, but that version gets bundled with the extension, so it might be outdated sometimes.
See the TODO list for the list of things that are not implemented/ready yet.
If you are a developer yourself:
See the “Development” section of extension’s README.md
for building from source and debugging instructions.
See all the hoardy-web
’s-related links above, and also see the description of the on-disk file format used by all these tools.
Finally, if your questions are still unanswered, then open an issue on GitHub or get in touch otherwise.
Hoardy-Web
exists?So, you wake up remembering something interesting you saw a long time ago. Knowing you won’t find it in your normal browsing history, which only contains the URLs and the titles of the pages you visited in the last 3 months, you try looking it up on Google. You fail. Eventually, you remember the website you seen it at, or maybe you re-discovered the link in question in an old message to/from a friend, or maybe a tool like recoll or Promnesia helped you. You open the link… and discover it offline/gone/a parked domain. Not a problem! Have no fear! You go to Wayback Machine and look it up there… and discover they only archived an ancient version of it and the thing you wanted is missing there.
Or, say, you read a cool fanfiction on AO3 years ago, you even wrote down the URL, you go back to it wanting to experience it again… and discover the author made it private… and Wayback Machine saved only the very first chapter.
Or, say, there is a web page that can not be easily reached via curl
/wget
(because it is behind a paywall or complex authentication method that is hard to reproduce outside of a browser) but for accessibility or just simple reading comfort reasons each time you visit that page you want to automatically feed its source to a script that strips and/or modifies its HTML
markup in a website-specific way and feeds it into a TTS engine, a Braille display, or a book reader app.
With most modern web browsers you can do TTS either out-of-the-box or by installing an add-on (though, be aware of privacy issues when using most of these), but tools that can do website-specific accessibility without also being website-specific UI apps are very few.
Or, say, there’s a web page/app you use (like a banking app), but it lacks some features you want, and in your browser’s Network Monitor you can see it uses JSON RPC
or some such to fetch its data, and you want those JSON
s for yourself (e.g., to compute statistics and supplement the app output with them), but the app in question has no public API and scraping it with a script is non-trivial (e.g., the site does complicated JavaScript
+multifactor-based auth, tries to detect you are actually using a browser, and bans you immediately if not).
Or, maybe, you want to parse those behind-auth pages with a script, save the results to a database, and then do interesting things with them (e.g., track price changes, manually classify, annotate, and merge pages representing the same product by different sellers, do complex queries, like sorting by price/unit or price/weight, limit results by geographical locations extracted from text labels, etc).
Or, say, you want to fetch a bunch of pages belonging to two recommendation lists on AO3 or GoodReads, get all outgoing links for each fetched page, union sets for the pages belonging to the same recommendation list, and then intersect the results of the two lists to get a shorter list of things you might want to read with higher probability.
Or, more generally, say, you want to tag web pages referenced from a certain set of other web pages with some tag in your indexing software, and update it automatically each time you visit any of the source pages.
Or, say, you want to combine a full-text indexing engine, your browsing and derived web link graph data, your states/ratings/notes from org-mode, messages from your friends, and other archives, so that you could do arbitrarily complex queries over it all, like “show me all GoodReads pages for all books not marked as DONE
or CANCELED
in my org-mode
files, ever mentioned by any of my friends, ordered by undirected-graph Pagerank algorithm biased with my own book ratings (so that books sharing GoodReads lists with the books I finished and liked will get higher scores)”. So, basically, you want a private personalized Bayesian recommendation system.
“If it is on the Internet, it is on Internet forever!” they said. “Everything will have a RESTful API!” they said. They lied!
Things vanish from the Internet, and from Wayback Machine, all the time.
A lot of useful stuff never got RESTful APIs, those RESTful APIs that exists are frequently buggy, you’ll probably have to scrape data from HTML
s anyway.
“Semantic Web will allow arbitrarily complex queries spanning multiple data sources!” they said. Well, 25 years later (“RDF Model and Syntax Specification” was published in 1999), almost no progress there, the most commonly used subset of RDF does what indexing systems in 1970s did, but less efficiently and with a worse UI.
Meanwhile, Hoardy-Web
provides tools to help with all of the above.
Hoardy-Web
is designed to
To conform to the above design principles
the Hoardy-Web
Web Extension browser add-on does almost no actual work, simply generating HTTP
request+response dumps, archiving them, and then freeing the memory as soon as possible (unless you enable limbo mode, but then you asked for it), thus keeping your browsing experience snappy even on ancient hardware;
also the Hoardy-Web
extension collects data as browser gives it, without any data normalization and conversion, when possible;
the dumps are generated using the simplest, trivially parsable with many third-party libraries, yet most space-efficient on-disk file format representing separate HTTP
requests+responses there currently is (aka Web Request+Response
, WRR
), which is a file format that is both more general and more simple than WARC
, much simpler than that mitmproxy
uses, and much more efficient than HAR
;
the Hoardy-Web
extension can write the dumps it produces to disk by itself by generating fake-Dowloads containing bundles of WRR
dumps, but because of limitations of browser APIs, Hoardy-Web
can’t tell if a file generated this way succeeds at being written to disk;
which is why, for users who want write guarantees and error reporting, the extension has other archival methods, which includes archival by submission via HTTP
;
server-side part of submission via HTTP
can be done either
via the hoardy-web-sas
simple archiving server, which is tiny (less than 300 lines of code) pure-Python script that provides an HTTP
interface for archival of dumps given via HTTP POST
requests;
or via the hoardy-web serve
, which is not tiny at all, but it can combine both archival and replay;
all of the Hoardy-Web
extension, hoardy-web-sas
, and hoardy-web serve
write those dumps to disk as-is, with optional compression for data storage efficiency;
meanwhile, viewing/replay of, generation of website mirrors from, organization and management, data normalization (massaging), post-processing, other ways of extraction of useful values from archived WRR
files — i.e. basically everything that is complex and/or computationally expensive — is delegated to hoardy-web
tool;
the hoardy-web
tool is very easy to use in your own scripts;
by default, none these tools ever overwrite any files on disk (to prevent accidental data loss);
this way, if something breaks, you can always trivially return to a known-good state by simply copying some old files from a backup as there’s no need to track versions or anything like that.
Sorted by similarity to Hoardy-Web
, most similar projects first. “Cons” and “Pros” are in comparison to the main workflow of Hoardy-Web
.
A self-hosted web crawler and web replay system written in Node.js
.
Of all the tools known to me, DownloadNet
is most similar to the intended workflow of the Hoardy-Web
. Similarly to the combination of Hoardy-Web
extension and hoardy-web serve
and unlike pywb
, heritrix
, and other similar tools discussed below, DownloadNet
captures web data directly from browser’s runtime. The difference is that Hoardy-Web
does this using webRequest
WebExtensions
API and Chromium’s debugger
API while DownloadNet
is actually a web crawler that crawls the web by spawning a Chromium browser instance and attaching to it via its debug protocol (which are not the same thing). This is a bit weird, but it does work, and it allows you to use DownloadNet
to archive everything passively as you browse, similarly to Hoardy-Web
, since you can just browse in that debugged Chromium window and it will archive the data it fetches.
Pros:
Hoardy-Web
aims to do, exceptCons:
Same issues:
When running under Chromium, a bunch of Chromium’s bugs make many things pretty annoying and somewhat flaky.
Those issues have no workarounds known to me except for “switch to Firefox-based browser”, which you can do with Hoardy-Web
.
A Man-in-the-middle SSL proxy.
Hoardy-Web
was heavily inspired by mitmproxy
and, essentially, aims to be to an in-browser alternative to it. I.e., unlike other alternatives discussed here, both Hoardy-Web
and mitmproxy
capture mostly-raw HTTP
traffic, not just web pages. Unlike mitmproxy
, however, Hoardy-Web
is designed primarily for web archival purposes, not traffic inspection and protocol reverse-engineering, even though you can do some of that with Hoardy-Web
too.
Pros:
Hoardy-Web
add-on currently does not capture.Cons:
mitmproxy
dump files are flat streams of HTTP
requests and responses that use custom frequently changing between versions data format, so you’ll have to re-parse them repeatedly using mitmproxy
’s own parsers to get to the requests you want;Though, the latter issue can be solved via this project’s hoardy-web
tool as it can take mitmproxy
dumps as inputs.
HAR
archives from time to timeCons:
Hoardy-Web
does, you will have to manually enable it for each browser tab;HAR
s are JSON
, meaning all that binary data gets encoded indirectly, thus making resulting HAR
archives very inefficient for long-term storage, as they take a lot of disk space, even when compressed;Though, the latter issue can be solved via this project’s hoardy-web
tool as it can take HAR
dumps as inputs.
Wireshark
, or tcpdump
, or some such, to capture your web trafficPros:
Hoardy-Web
add-on currently does not.Cons:
HTTP
data from the PCAP
dumps; andPCAP
dumps are IP packet-level, thus also inefficient for this use case; andPCAP
dumps of SSL traffic can not be compressed much, thus storing the raw captures will take a lot of disk space.And hoardy-web
tool can’t help you with the latter, at the moment.
Browser extensions similar to the Hoardy-Web
extension in their implementation, though not in their philosophy and intended use.
Overall, Hoardy-Web
and archiveweb.page
extensions have a similar vibe, but the main difference is that archiveweb.page
and related tools are designed for capturing web pages with the explicit aim to share the resulting archives with the public, while Hoardy-Web
is designed for private capture of personally visited pages first.
In practical terms, archiveweb.page
has a “Record” button, which you need to press to start recording a browsing session in a separate tab into a separate WARC
file. In contrast, Hoardy-Web
, by default, in background, captures and archives all successful HTTP
requests and their responses from all your open browser tabs.
Pros:
WARC
format, which is a de-facto standard;Hoardy-Web
currently has.Cons:
WARC
format, which is rather limited in what it can capture (compared to WRR
, HAR
, PCAP
, and mitmproxy
);archiveweb.page
archive all of your web browsing like Hoardy-Web
does:
archiveweb.page
for each browser tab; and thenproblematic
reqres status of Hoardy-Web
, which is super useful for ensuring your captures are actually good, and not broken in some non-obvious ways because of networking or intermittent server errors;archiveweb.page
also requires constant manual effort to export the data out.Differences in design:
archiveweb.page
captures whole browsing sessions, while Hoardy-Web
captures separate HTTP
requests and responses;archiveweb.page
implements “Autopilot”, which Hoardy-Web
will never get (if you want that, Hoardy-Web
expects you to use UserScripts instead).Same issues:
Both Hoardy-Web
and archiveweb.page
store captured data internally in the browser’s local storage/IndexedDB by default.
This is both convenient for on-boarding new users and helps in preserving the captured data when your computer looses power unexpectedly, your browser crashes, you quit from it before everything gets archived, or the extension crashes or gets reloaded unexpectedly.
On the other hand, this is both inefficient and dangerous for long-term preservation of said data, since it is very easy to accidentally loose data archived to browser’s local storage (e.g., by uninstalling the extension).
Which is why Hoardy-Web
has Submit dumps via 'HTTP'
mode which will automatically submit your dumps to an archiving server instead.
When running under Chromium, a bunch of Chromium’s bugs make many things pretty annoying and flaky, which — if you know what to look for — you can notice straight in the advertisement animation on their “Usage” page.
Those issues have no workarounds known to me except for “switch to Firefox-based browser”, which you can do with Hoardy-Web
.
Browser add-ons that capture whole web pages by taking their DOM
snapshots and saving all requisite resources the captured page references.
Capturing a page with SingleFile
generates a single (usually, quite large) HTML
file with all the resources embedded into it. WebScrapBook
saves its captures to browser’s local storage or to a remote server instead.
Pros:
Hoardy-Web
currently does not.Cons:
Hoardy-Web
does, you will have to manually capture each page you want to save;POST
request data or JSONs fetched by web apps;HTTP
requests and responses, capturing a page will make the browser re-download non-cached page resources a second time;CSS
, fonts, etc) for each web page to make each saved page self-contained.Differences in design:
DOM
snapshots, while Hoardy-Web
captures HTTP
requests and responses (though, it can capture DOM
snapshots too).A browser extension that implements an alternative mechanism to browser bookmarks. Saving a web page into Memex saves a DOM
snapshot of the tab in question into an in-browser database. Memex then implements full-text search engine for saved snapshots and PDF
s.
Pros:
Hoardy-Web
currently does not;Hoardy-Web
only has the non-indexed hoardy-web * --*grep*
options; though, you can use recoll with hoardy-web
as an input filter;Cons:
Hoardy-Web
does, you will have to manually save each page you visit;PDFs
, you won’t be able to save POST
request data or JSONs fetched by web apps;Hoardy-Web
, it is very fat — it’s .xpi
is more than 40 times larger;about:performance
);HTTP
requests to third-party services in background (Hoardy-Web
does none of that);Differences in design:
DOM
snapshots and PDF
s, while Hoardy-Web
captures HTTP
requests and responses (though, it can capture DOM
snapshots too);Hoardy-Web
expects you to use normal file backup tools for that.A web archive replay system with a builtin web crawler and HTTP
proxy. Brought to you by the people behind the Wayback Machine and then adopted by the people behind archiveweb.page
.
A tool similar to hoardy-web serve
.
Pros:
WARC
format, which is a de-facto standard;hoardy-web serve
currently has;Cons:
it produces and consumes archives in WARC
format, which is rather limited in what it can capture (compared to WRR
, HAR
, PCAP
, and mitmproxy
);
it has no equivalents to most other sub-commands of hoardy-web
tool;
compared to hoardy-web serve
, it’s much more complex, it has a builtin web crawler (aka “pywb
Recorder”, which does not work for uncooperative websites anyway), and can also do capture by trying to be an HTTP
proxy (which also does not work for many websites);
I assume it has all these features because archiveweb.page
is Chromium-only, which forces it to be rather unreliable (see a list of relevant Chromium’s bugs) and annoying to use when you want to be sure the whole page was captured properly (since it has no equivalent to problematic
reqres status of Hoardy-Web
).
Meanwhile, Hoardy-Web
has problematic
reqres tracking and the extension works perfectly well under Firefox-based browsers, which allow for much more reliable captures.
since hoardy-web serve
uses a much simpler and faster to parse WRR
file format, it is able to add new dumps to its index synchronously with their archival, allowing for their immediate replay.
The crawler behind the Wayback Machine. It’s a self-hosted web app into which you can feed the URLs for them to be archived, so to make it archive all of your web browsing:
A tool similar to hoardy-web serve
.
Pros:
WARC
format, which is a de-facto standard;Cons:
WARC
format, which is rather limited in what it can capture (compared to WRR
, HAR
, PCAP
, and mitmproxy
);hoardy-web
tool;Hoardy-Web
does, you’ll need to write a separate browser plugin to redirect all links you click to your local instance’s /save/
REST
API URLs (which is not hard, but I’m unaware if any such add-on exists);HTTP
POST
requests with it;HTTP
server of a web page that is being archived can tell it is being crawled.A web crawler and self-hosted web app into which you can feed the URLs for them to be archived.
Pros:
WARC
format, which is a de-facto standard;git
repos, etc;Cons:
WARC
format, which is rather limited in what it can capture (compared to WRR
, HAR
, PCAP
, and mitmproxy
);Hoardy-Web
does,
mitmproxy
with archivebox-proxy plugin;HTTP POST
requests with it.Still, probably the best of the self-hosted web-app-server kind of tools for this ATM.
A system similar to ArchiveBox
, but has a bulit-in tagging system and archives pages as raw HTML
+ whole-page PNG
rendering/screenshot — which is a bit weird, but it has the advantage of not needing any replay machinery at all for re-viewing simple web pages, you only need a plain simple image viewer, though it will take a lot of disk space to store those huge whole-page “screenshot” images.
Pros and Cons are almost identical to those of ArchiveBox
above, except it has less third-party tools around it so less stuff can be automated easily.
wget -mpk
and curl
Pros:
wget
can produce archives in WARC
format, which is a de-facto standard.Cons:
Hoardy-Web
does, you will have to manually capture each page you want to save;wget
and making wget
play pretend at being a normal web browser is basically impossible;curl
, curl
also doesn’t have the equivalent to wget
’s -mpk
options;wget -mpk
done right.
Pros:
WARC
format, which is a de-facto standard and has a lot of tooling around it;Cons:
Hoardy-Web
does, you will have to manually capture each page you want to save;HTTP POST
requests with it;WARC
files.A simple web crawler built on top of wpull
, presented to you by the ArchiveTeam, a group associated with the Wayback Machine which appears to be the source of archives for the most of the interesting pages I find there.
Pros:
WARC
format, which is a de-facto standard and has a lot of tooling around it;Cons:
Hoardy-Web
does, you will have to manually capture each page you want to save;HTTP POST
requests with it;WARC
files.Stand-alone tools doing the same thing SingleFile add-on does: generate single-file HTML
s with bundled resources viewable directly in the browser.
Pros:
Cons:
Hoardy-Web
does, you will have to manually capture each page you want to save;HTTP POST
requests using them;Stand-alone tool based on SingleFile
, using a headless browser to capture pages.
A more robust solution to do what monolith
and obelisk
do, if you don’t mind Node.js
and the need to run a headless browser.
A self-hosted wiki that archives pages you link to in background.
ArchiveBox wiki has a long list or related things.
It’s an awesome personal private archival system adhering to the same philosophy as Hoardy-Web
, but it’s basically an abstraction replacing your file system with a content-addressed store that can be rendered into different “views”, including a POSIXy file system.
It can do very little in helping you actually archive a web page, but you can start dumping new Hoardy-Web
.wrr
files with compression disabled, decompress you existing .wrr
files, and then feed them all into Perkeep to be stored and automatically replicated to your backup copies forever. (Perkeep already has a better compression than what Hoardy-Web
currently does and provides a FUSE FS interface for transparent operation, so compressing things twice would be rather counterproductive.)
See CHANGELOG.md
.
See the bottom of CHANGELOG.md
.
GPLv3+, some small library parts are MIT.
Contributions are accepted both via GitHub issues and PRs, and via pure email. In the latter case I expect to see patches formatted with git-format-patch
.
If you want to perform a major change and you want it to be accepted upstream here, you should probably write me an email or open an issue on GitHub first. In the cover letter, describe what you want to change and why. I might also have a bunch of code doing most of what you want in my stash of unpublished patches already.