I find SingleFile [0] to be a much more robust version of this.
It strips out all the JavaScript too, but also packs everything into a single HTML file that is easy to transfer. Binary assets (like web fonts and images) are packed as base64 strings.
What I'm implementing here is mirroring a whole website, with all its subpages, so you can browse it all offline. For example, all essays from paulgraham.com.
Oh, I see. In that case, feature-wise, it is actually a modern alternative to HTTrack.
I think the misunderstanding stems from the browser's "Save As" reference in the description. It is misleading. You use "Save As" to save a single page, not an entire website.
Also, the description lacks a clear explanation of the project's purpose. It would be helpful to include a sentence explaining that the program downloads an entire website, not just a single page.
One use I'd have for this is company wikis that you want to give folks easy offline access to (maybe the wiki has documentation that's useful at sites that don't have cellular coverage).
Cool!
It would be especially cool to have a version that didn't require the separate serving process - even though it's nifty you can package up a whole site as a single binary.
Maybe a single HTML entrypoint shim with a bit of javascript that could index into an archive (potentially embedded) of the site's content?
Submitting this to Hacker News is the right place! Thanks for your idea. I will consider implementing that :)
Also, in my mind, I already have a script/program to convert HTML to Markdown, so it could actually store everything on disk as a folder of Markdown files, and then commit them to a Git repo.
This seems like it has potential to create a lot of load on a site- are there settings to set how fast it clones or avoid images/videos?
Is there a way to only get a subset of a website?
This is quite useful tool, especially for the cases where internet access is limited (the flights for example). I implemented it as a separate feature in mdview.io: for example you can export a document as a html file for offline usage, with all the presentation features like reach tables, mermaid and etc built in. Example https://mdview.io/s/why-markdown-became-default-format-for-a... then try to Export - Export HTML
I've been using httrack (https://www.httrack.com) to download wikis to read on flights, which isn't perfect but better than I'd found previously. I'll try this out, I'd be delighted to have good results. Thanks for the post.
Cool concept. I would like to see this combined with mitmproxy for archive grade fidelity. You could be saving exactly the data served and at the same time a representation by a modern (contemporary) browser, with all JS having run. This combination would be my perfect replacement for the WARC format.
That's neat! In my opinion, the WARC format is quite tricky and underspecified especially since HTTP2 introduced new semantics. It encodes too much in-band and requires rewriting of the server data. A mitmproxy capture is higher fidelity and supports capturing modern features such as WebSockets. I think if we could wrap Kage's crawler interactions by it and store its capture (the intercepted traffic), we could make a potentially nice new archival format.
I tried to follow well-known formats first, such as WARC and ZIM from Kiwix, so we could benefit from existing tooling support.
For my own custom data format, I have a lot of private code that I plan to release soon. It is optimized for compression, fast lookups, and more. I have been working on it for two years.
This is part of a larger, ambitious umbrella project: I am building Google from scratch (all open source), something that anyone can host, including the crawler, indexer, storage, and serving layers. Stay tuned!
I'm a fan of compatibility with established formats!
Sounds awesome. There is a lot of untapped potential with respect to efficiently archiving and indexing websites. I saw the impressive things Marginalia Search is doing in this area (the blog is great when it gets technical). There is also a lot of very complete archives of websites out there which are not being indexed at all, and I would love to make them available for researchers. In any case, I'm interested in your project!
Neat project, I like the idea.
One thing from a quick read: you launch Chrome with --no-sandbox. Is there a good reason for that? Security wise it's probably not a good idea. If there is no reason, I'd suggest leaving the sandbox on!
This is cool. I could see myself downloading the articles behind the first couple pages of hacker news with this, for viewing on a flight or long distance train ride with spotty internet
Nice idea!
fwiw, false positives and all, but the Windows 11 default Windows Security doesn't like it:
`leakless.exe: Operation did not complete successfully because the file contains a virus or potentially unwanted software.`
I find SingleFile [0] to be a much more robust version of this.
It strips out all the JavaScript too, but also packs everything into a single HTML file that is easy to transfer. Binary assets (like web fonts and images) are packed as base64 strings.
They also offer a CLI powered by Puppeteer. [1]
[0]: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/singlefile
[1]: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli
It seems this repo only saves one web page?
What I'm implementing here is mirroring a whole website, with all its subpages, so you can browse it all offline. For example, all essays from paulgraham.com.
Oh, I see. In that case, feature-wise, it is actually a modern alternative to HTTrack.
I think the misunderstanding stems from the browser's "Save As" reference in the description. It is misleading. You use "Save As" to save a single page, not an entire website.
Also, the description lacks a clear explanation of the project's purpose. It would be helpful to include a sentence explaining that the program downloads an entire website, not just a single page.
What's the difference with, any webbrowser on a computer, File -> Save as ?
That's for a single page, this handles the whole site. Also the browser Save As options often work poorly.
And thanks for the link. Let me implement this single HTML feature, it looks nice to have!
One use I'd have for this is company wikis that you want to give folks easy offline access to (maybe the wiki has documentation that's useful at sites that don't have cellular coverage).
Cool!
It would be especially cool to have a version that didn't require the separate serving process - even though it's nifty you can package up a whole site as a single binary.
Maybe a single HTML entrypoint shim with a bit of javascript that could index into an archive (potentially embedded) of the site's content?
Submitting this to Hacker News is the right place! Thanks for your idea. I will consider implementing that :)
Also, in my mind, I already have a script/program to convert HTML to Markdown, so it could actually store everything on disk as a folder of Markdown files, and then commit them to a Git repo.
This seems like it has potential to create a lot of load on a site- are there settings to set how fast it clones or avoid images/videos? Is there a way to only get a subset of a website?
Could you help create a new issue for that? I will do it later. It is already 1:00 AM my time, but I am happy that anyone is interested in it. : )
This is quite useful tool, especially for the cases where internet access is limited (the flights for example). I implemented it as a separate feature in mdview.io: for example you can export a document as a html file for offline usage, with all the presentation features like reach tables, mermaid and etc built in. Example https://mdview.io/s/why-markdown-became-default-format-for-a... then try to Export - Export HTML
I've been using httrack (https://www.httrack.com) to download wikis to read on flights, which isn't perfect but better than I'd found previously. I'll try this out, I'd be delighted to have good results. Thanks for the post.
Cool concept. I would like to see this combined with mitmproxy for archive grade fidelity. You could be saving exactly the data served and at the same time a representation by a modern (contemporary) browser, with all JS having run. This combination would be my perfect replacement for the WARC format.
I'm working on WARC too, with format from Common Crawl!
By converting it to Markdown, we save a lot of space, but it is for a different purpose and a different project: https://github.com/tamnd/ccrawl-cli
That's neat! In my opinion, the WARC format is quite tricky and underspecified especially since HTTP2 introduced new semantics. It encodes too much in-band and requires rewriting of the server data. A mitmproxy capture is higher fidelity and supports capturing modern features such as WebSockets. I think if we could wrap Kage's crawler interactions by it and store its capture (the intercepted traffic), we could make a potentially nice new archival format.
I tried to follow well-known formats first, such as WARC and ZIM from Kiwix, so we could benefit from existing tooling support.
For my own custom data format, I have a lot of private code that I plan to release soon. It is optimized for compression, fast lookups, and more. I have been working on it for two years. This is part of a larger, ambitious umbrella project: I am building Google from scratch (all open source), something that anyone can host, including the crawler, indexer, storage, and serving layers. Stay tuned!
Looking forward to the next project! I love these kinds of archiving tools.
I'm a fan of compatibility with established formats!
Sounds awesome. There is a lot of untapped potential with respect to efficiently archiving and indexing websites. I saw the impressive things Marginalia Search is doing in this area (the blog is great when it gets technical). There is also a lot of very complete archives of websites out there which are not being indexed at all, and I would love to make them available for researchers. In any case, I'm interested in your project!
sound interesting
Neat project, I like the idea. One thing from a quick read: you launch Chrome with --no-sandbox. Is there a good reason for that? Security wise it's probably not a good idea. If there is no reason, I'd suggest leaving the sandbox on!
In any case, cool stuff :)
This is cool. I could see myself downloading the articles behind the first couple pages of hacker news with this, for viewing on a flight or long distance train ride with spotty internet
Nice idea! fwiw, false positives and all, but the Windows 11 default Windows Security doesn't like it: `leakless.exe: Operation did not complete successfully because the file contains a virus or potentially unwanted software.`
So this is like using wget --mirror except that it works on pages that require javascript, right?
Yeah, it is. For example, openai.com is rendered with Next.js, so I will try to mirror it tomorrow.
curl can do this
nice