6.1 KiB
Pocket & Pinboard Stream Archive 
(Your own personal Way-Back Machine)
Save an archived copy of all websites you star using Pocket or Pinboard, indexed in an html file. Powered by the new headless Google Chrome and good 'ol wget.
Quickstart
archive.py is a script that takes a Pocket export, and turns it into a browsable html archive that you can store locally or host online.
Runtime: I've found it takes about an hour to download 1000 articles, and they'll take up roughly 1GB. Those numbers are from running it single-threaded on my i5 machine with 50mbps down. YMMV.
Dependencies: google-chrome >= 59, wget >= 1.16, python3 >= 3.5 (chromium >= v59 also works well, yay open source!)
# On Mac:
brew install Caskroom/versions/google-chrome-canary wget python3
echo -e '#!/bin/bash\n/Applications/Google\ Chrome\ Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome\ Canary "$@"' > /usr/local/bin/google-chrome
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/google-chrome
# On Linux:
wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list'
apt update; apt install google-chrome-beta python3 wget
# Check:
google-chrome --version && which wget && which python3 && echo "[√] All dependencies installed."
On some Linux distributions the python3 package might not be recent enough. If this is the case for you, resort to installing a recent enough version manually.
add-apt-repository ppa:fkrull/deadsnakes && apt update && apt install python3.6
If you still need help, the official Python docs are a good place to start.
Archiving:
- Download your pocket export file
ril_export.htmlfrom https://getpocket.com/export - Download this repo
git clone https://github.com/pirate/pocket-archive-stream cd pocket-archive-stream/./archive.py ~/Downloads/ril_export.html [pinboard|pocket]
It produces a folder pocket/ containing an index.html, and archived copies of all the sites,
organized by timestamp. For each sites it saves:
- wget of site, e.g.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.htmlwith .html appended if not present sreenshot.png1440x900 screenshot of site using headless chromeoutput.pdfPrinted PDF of site using headless chrome
You can tweak parameters like screenshot size, file paths, timeouts, etc. in archive.py.
You can also tweak the outputted html index in index_template.html. It just uses python
format strings (not a proper templating engine like jinja2), which is why the CSS is double-bracketed {{...}}.
Live Updating: (coming soon)
It's possible to pull links via the pocket API or public pocket RSS feeds instead of downloading an html export.
Once I write a script to do that, we can stick this in cron and have it auto-update on it's own.
For now you just have to download ril_export.html and run archive.py each time it updates. The script
will run fast subsequent times because it only downloads new links that haven't been archived already.
Publishing Your Archive
The archive is suitable for serving on your personal server, you can upload the
archive to /var/www/pocket (or pinboard) and allow people to access your saved copies of sites.
Just stick this in your nginx config to properly serve the wget-archived sites:
location /pocket/ {
alias /var/www/pocket/;
index index.html;
autoindex on;
try_files $uri $uri/ $uri.html =404;
}
Make sure you're not running any content as CGI or PHP, you only want to serve static files!
Urls look like: https://sweeting.me/pocket/archive/1493350273/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_philosophers_problem
Info
This is basically an open-source version of Pocket Premium (which you should consider paying for!). I got tired of sites I saved going offline or changing their URLS, so I started archiving a copy of them locally now, similar to The Way-Back Machine provided by archive.org. Self hosting your own archive allows you to save PDFs & Screenshots of dynamic sites in addition to static html, something archive.org doesn't do.
Now I can rest soundly knowing important articles and resources I like wont dissapear off the internet.
My published archive as an example: sweeting.me/pocket.
Security WARNING
Hosting other people's site content has security implications for your domain, make sure you understand the dangers of hosting other people's CSS & JS files on your domain. It's best to put this on a domain of its own to slightly mitigate CSRF attacks.
It might also be prudent to blacklist your archive in your robots.txt so that search engines dont index
the content on your domain.
TODO
- body text extraction using fathom
- auto-tagging based on important extracted words
- audio & video archiving with
youtube-dl - full-text indexing with elasticsearch
- video closed-caption downloading for full-text indexing video content
- automatic text summaries of article with summarization library
- feature image extraction
- http support (from my https-only domain)
- try getting dead links from archive.org (https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader)