Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing

Posted by tamnd 2 days ago

Comments

Comment by simonw 2 days ago

I was intrigued to see how the demo GIF in the README was generated: https://github.com/tamnd/kage/blob/01e75b87ecc893bbba7943c63...

Turns out it's using another project by the same author: https://github.com/tamnd/ascii-gif

The script used for the demo is at https://github.com/tamnd/kage/blob/01e75b87ecc893bbba7943c63... and has a comment showing how to run it:

  ascii-gif render docs/demo/kage.tape -o docs/static/demo.gif

Looks like it's an opinionated wrapper around https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs

Comment by vqtska 2 days ago

You can also do an animated svg which is way smaller than a gif because it's just text keyframes (https://github.com/vytskalt/pseudoc/blob/main/assets/factori...)

Comment by embedding-shape 2 days ago

Very cool, never thought of that! "way smaller" is almost an understatement, when it's 50kb :P Neat that it loads in GitHub READMEs as well, which is probably a large reason people use .gif today.

Comment by Noumenon72 2 days ago

How can you do it? I don't see an SVG output from ascii-gif.

Comment by vqtska 2 days ago

I used a different project, https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli

Comment by LocoPadre 2 days ago

it might be this: https://github.com/mrmarble/termsvg

Comment by jubilanti 2 days ago

Have you heard the good news about the terminal savior asciinema -- https://asciinema.org/

Comment by embedding-shape 2 days ago

It's a cool tool/platform, but very different. Asciinema tries to make the "multimedia" itself better by making it actual text instead of being video/images, while the CLI command above turns actual text into multimedia supported by platforms already. Both are useful, both have their use cases :)

Comment by alterom 2 days ago

FYI, on other platforms (Windows/MacOS), LiceCAP is a fantastic tool to record screen into compact GIFs by the author of Winamp and Reaper DAW:

https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

I have a bunch of opinionated/personal-use binaries like this in my $HOME/bin/, like delete-all-npm, clean-rust-cache, download-youtube-playlist, and get-markdown <url>. It feels good, and I don't need to remember any commands. Sometimes my coding agent can figure out how to call some of those tools too ;))

Comment by stavros 2 days ago

VHS is fantastic for scripting cli video generation.

Comment by stellamariesays 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by wolttam 2 days ago

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?

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

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.

Comment by d3Xt3r 2 days ago

I'd like to request something between what GP suggested and what your program is doing currently - basically I still want a single binary, but instead of embedding a full browser in it, I would like the binary to be just a self-extracting archive that calls the user's default browser, maybe in a new window/frame.

Basically I'm looking for something like the old-school .chm files on Windows, where you could pack a bunch of HTML documents into a single archive and open it without needing to embed a full browser engine.

This would have the advantage of keeping the file sizes really small. And you don't have to worry about the browser engine become outdated and potentially becoming an attack vector.

Comment by Bad_CRC 1 day ago

I instantly searched for chm on the comments and yours was the only one :o

Comment by samat 1 day ago

You are not alone

For the younger generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help

Comment by d3Xt3r 1 day ago

I really miss the old .chm files, they used to be quite thorough, like the ones that came with MSDN / VS 6.0. In modern times, AutoHotkey continued that tradition, absolutely love their comprehensive .chm. But in the Linux/modern world, outside of the man pages, you need to go to the web everytime to lookup stuff and I hate that.

Comment by mgiampapa 2 days ago

I think the zim flow was perfect for offline use. I know I will be making use of it as soon as I can figure out how to pass chrome the cookies so I can be signed into the site. Didn't see it in the page, but I didn't look closely yet.

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

Not yet supporting cookies, since I created this tool for shadowing public websites first. I will add options to pass cookies later. It will pass them to the underlying Chrome/Chromium process, so it should not be hard to do.

Comment by mcdonje 2 days ago

Not to load you up with too many ideas, but a markdown folder sounds a lot like obsidian, which has a plugin system now.

Epub would also be a great target.

Comment by smeej 2 days ago

I would use the shit out of this. I'm a heavy user of Logseq (OG, the md file-based version). Would LOVE to save my favorite web resources this way.

Comment by gwern 2 days ago

> Maybe a single HTML entrypoint shim with a bit of javascript that could index into an archive (potentially embedded) of the site's content?

So something like SingleFileZ https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ or Gwtar https://gwern.net/gwtar ?

Comment by everforward 1 day ago

This is a nice way to do it if you’re already stuck with a solution (print to PDF would probably also, if you can script it).

In a green field world, I have a personal requirement that technical documentation systems are capable of bulk exporting to a human-readable format on disk. I’m pretty flexible on what that is, though. Markdown is preferred, but I’m also fine with static, dependency-free HTML and I could accept PDFs if the rest of it is super nice.

It’s an integral part of DR, and most places want their docs on-premise, so DR effectively requires offline documentation. Everywhere I’ve worked either a) writes documentation in something that works offline (eg git repo with tarballs somewhere), or b) has invested a bunch of time in trying to scrape their own wiki into something legible during DR.

I guess it’s a long-winded way of saying “that’s using a tool to fix a self-inflicted problem that shouldn’t exist”.

Comment by ninalanyon 2 days ago

> kage serve $HOME/data/kage/paulgraham.com

If the result is static why does it need a server? Isn't it possible to make it so that it can simply be opened by the browser? Like:

$ firefox $HOME/data/kage/paulgraham.com

Then the result would be useable on machines without kage nstalled.

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

You could use python -m http.server instead. I haven't tried it yet, but it should work.

Actually, Kage has two parts: a crawler that crawls pages and converts them to clean HTML by capturing the DOM after rendering in Chrome/Chromium, and a pack/serve component that packages the result as either a ZIM file for Kiwix or an executable file.

Comment by doctoboggan 2 days ago

Usually JavaScript is blocked when you load pages that way.

Comment by dmazzoni 2 days ago

Not all JavaScript, but a lot of APIs are restricted

Comment by pixelatedindex 2 days ago

I thought all the JS was stripper?

Comment by embedding-shape 2 days ago

Since when? You won't be able to make HTTP requests to localhost, as it'd be a different Origin, but I don't think any mainstream browser blocks JS outright when you use file:// to load and view HTML files.

Comment by rzzzt 2 days ago

Somewhere around 2019, each document loaded from file:// became its own origin in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1500453 (I didn't check when this happened in Chromium)

Related WHATWG discussion: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3099

Comment by embedding-shape 2 days ago

Yeah, but that's fine, the document is .html, and it can load ./app.js or ./style.css just fine even if loaded by file:// (as long as it isn't initiated by JS itself, then Origin starts to matter a lot more), otherwise basically every single local HTML file would suddenly be broken, I don't think anyone would have accepted that even with the origin changes.

Comment by rzzzt 1 day ago

I tried this on a small example and it works indeed. In my head this would have been something like a restrictive CSP script-source directive, even if not exposed in response headers or anything.

Comment by embedding-shape 1 day ago

> I tried this on a small example and it works indeed.

I was thinking "of course it works, how else would people get started creating websites otherwise?" then I remember what's the most common approaches in the frontend ecosystem nowadays.

Back in the days of yore, every tutorial/book started with "First we create a index.html file which you open in your browser ...", even a JavaScript resource would start with this of course :)

Comment by rzzzt 15 hours ago

Weeellll those tutorials span a ~30 year time range now :) AMPP stacks and Python's built-in HTTP server was available most of the time if you needed to get away from the file:// protocol.

The protection mechanism was introduced so that malicious saved pages can't just grab things from your Downloads folder and send stuff it to an attacker's server. But the method turned out to be a bit more refined than I have imagined: you can display an image but can't grab the pixels, run a script but not inspect its source code, fetch() will be unavailable, etc.

Comment by dncornholio 2 days ago

React and Angular are completely broken through file://

Comment by embedding-shape 2 days ago

I don't know about Angular but React works perfectly fine through file://. I'd think the bundler/packager matter more than whar JS libraries you use, you sure you're not actually thinking of something else not handling file:// properly?

Comment by recursive 2 days ago

I am quite familiar with this and it is factually false

Comment by danielheath 2 days ago

Js modules don’t work on file urls (classic js does).

Comment by recursive 2 days ago

They can be made to work with blob urls. I have done this.

Comment by danielheath 1 day ago

Okay that’s super interesting and I would love to see an example or writeup - I have a project which would benefit from being able to do that.

Comment by recursive 1 day ago

It's a technique I created (someone else must have done it first??) for a sandbox demonstrating a web UI framework I made. https://mutraction.dev/sandbox

To see it work, click "Download self contained .html" from the menu.

Here's the source file that handles this part: https://github.com/tomtheisen/mutraction/blob/master/mutract...

The idea is to use <script type="inline-module" name="foo">...</script> to define modules. That's something I just made up. For each such script, provision a blob URL. The main blocker is usually the same origin policy. Crucially, these blob URLs count as the same origin. So then you need to rewrite the imports from the named modules to the blob URLs. I used some regex rather than a proper parser, but it was more than good enough for me.

It seems quite doable to make some proper bundling tools around this concept.

Comment by afavour 2 days ago

You’ll likely run into a ton of CORS issues doing that.

Comment by embedding-shape 2 days ago

I don't think so, there is no HTTP requests being done from JS as it's stripped away, and all the other resources are pulled down (and I'm assume their reference made relative), so really shouldn't be any issues because of CORS at all.

Comment by xlii 2 days ago

> No tracking, no network calls, no surprises.

Won't comment on a project (though idea seems interesting) but this in README is a tell for me ;)

Comment by xd1936 1 day ago

It's not just no tracking — It's no surprises.

Comment by praveer13 1 day ago

Somehow 'Kage' is the first name claude suggests to me for any new project as well

Comment by timerol 1 day ago

The Japanese word for shadow?

Comment by maxloh 2 days ago

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

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

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.

Comment by maxloh 2 days ago

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.

Comment by nikisweeting 2 days ago

Singlefile supports scoped recursive crawls too: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli#:~:text=an...

I highly recommend reading the singlefile source or https://archiveweb.page/ to see how they handle closed shadow DOMs, cross-origin iframes, websockets, media urls, deduping large assets, etc.

Comment by sillysaurusx 2 days ago

> For example, all essays from paulgraham.com

Not the same thing, but I made a clone of pg’s website which can be used for exactly that: https://github.com/shawwn/pg

https://shawwn.github.io/pg/

If you want to read all essays, just clone the repo and open any of the .html files. Or any of the .page files which generated them.

Comment by sdevonoes 2 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by sermah 2 days ago

Um. Whose website are you on right now?

Comment by ivangelion 2 days ago

Don't come here to laugh but always great when it happens anyways.

Comment by wamatt 2 days ago

Love love love SingleFile too. The FF extension works pretty well for a clean save.

That said, Kage looks promising if OP can combine SingleFile reproduction quality with the HTTPTrack spidering approach. SPA's are kinda tricky with archiving and do wonder how well Kage would handle that

Comment by initramfs 2 days ago

I've seen the option in IE- .mhtml.

For some reason it displays in IE better but I don't recall seeing this option in chrome of Firefox recently..

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

And thanks for the link. Let me implement this single HTML feature, it looks nice to have!

Comment by maxloh 2 days ago

Yeah. An idea on top of that is to bundle an entire website into a single HTML page, with vendored JavaScript to enable client-side routing (all of the original pages' JS is still stripped out).

That way, the page is self-contained as it is, but requires no bundled binary code to serve the site. It is actually safer security-wise.

The vendored script can be as simple as this:

  const site = {
    "path-1": "<!DOCTYPE html><html> ... </html>",
    "path-2": "<!DOCTYPE html><html> ... </html>",
    // More paths
  }

  function attachListeners() {
    for (const [path, html] of Object.entries(site)) {
      document.querySelector(`a[href=${path}]`).onclick = () => {
        document.documentElement.outerHTML = html
        attachListeners()
      }
    }
  }

  document.addEventListeners("DOMContentLoaded", attachListeners)

Comment by HelloUsername 2 days ago

What's the difference with, any webbrowser on a computer, File -> Save as ?

Comment by nmstoker 2 days ago

That's for a single page, this handles the whole site. Also the browser Save As options often work poorly.

Comment by dmazzoni 2 days ago

Save As works fine for simple websites with static content.

Let's say you have a site that fetches content from a database. If you Save As, then at best you'll get a local copy of an HTML page with JS that loads the content from the same remote database. It might not work (since the local copy has a different origin), or if it does, it requires you to be online, which defeats half of the purpose.

What this project, and SingleFile, both do is save a snapshot of what the rendered page actually looks like at that moment in time. The scripts are stripped out so it runs locally and has no external dependencies.

Comment by arikrahman 2 days ago

This is what I first thought and it's a very elegant solution, and not needlessly overcomplicated.

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by telesilla 2 days ago

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.

Comment by throwaway219450 2 days ago

Specifically for wikis, is there a reason you wouldn't use Kiwix? For non "official" releases it's more complicated, but there are some services to generate the ZIM files. The desktop reader app is pretty good in my experience.

https://wiki.openzim.org/wiki/Build_your_ZIM_file

EDIT: https://get.kiwix.org/en/solutions/applications/kiwix-reader...

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

Kiwix has readers for almost every platform, Android, desktop, iPhone. That's why I made Kage produce ZIM file.

The executable file is mostly for people who don't have Kiwix installed yet, or just want to run the archive directly.

Comment by telesilla 2 days ago

Thanks, never knew about this and great to hear about it.

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

This brings back memories. Around twenty years ago, internet was still expensive dial-up, so I used to go to an internet cafe, run HTTrack to download websites and manga, copy everything onto my tiny 128MB USB stick (felt very large at that time), then bring it home and read offline ;))

Comment by nikisweeting 2 days ago

https://github.com/archiveteam/grab-site or browsertrix may be easier to use for some, it's what was used to save a lot of the data.gov stuff before it got taken down.

Comment by latexr 2 days ago

For those with an eReader, one thing that works really well is using pandoc to download and convert a webpage to EPUB that you can then load to your reader.

  pandoc --from html --to epub --output /PATH/TO/FILE.epub https://example.com

Comment by arikrahman 2 days ago

Thanks, will try this out on the Kobo later.

Comment by aynite 2 hours ago

nice job and good inspiration, i'm just looking for something like this for some local processing

Comment by gregwebs 2 days ago

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?

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

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. : )

Comment by ares623 2 days ago

Just pretend you're an AI crawler problem solved

Comment by dimiprasakis 2 days ago

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 :)

Comment by nikisweeting 2 days ago

--no-sandbox is needed in docker, maybe they assume it will mostly run in docker?

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

Exactly. For downloading, Kage requires Chrome or Chromium. Running it inside Docker makes setup easier and keeps cleanup simple:

https://github.com/tamnd/kage/blob/main/Dockerfile

Btw, let me think the way to only enable this when running inside Docker.

Comment by nikisweeting 2 days ago

Docker is designed to be undetectable by default, the best way I have found is to set env IN_DOCKER=True manually in your Dockerfile + check that there is no $DISPLAY configured + that you're on linux. Usually if all/most of those are true you can safely add --no-sandbox --disable-setuid-sandbox --disable-dev-shm-usage etc. all the docker-specific flags. Thats what we do in https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/blob/dev/Dockerfile...

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

It should be fixed by https://github.com/tamnd/kage/pull/12

Thanks for nice trick.

Comment by dimiprasakis 1 day ago

Cool approach.

But, a compromise still lands on host's kernel, Docker doesn't provide kernel isolation (well it does on a macOS because it runs in Docker machine but thats a side effect).

I wonder if a better solution would be to play with seccomp or Linux capabilities so that Chrome is sandboxed even in Docker. Not sure how this would work tbh.

Answering here to get ideas, I saw your fix on Git and request for feedback (will try to review and give it some thought once I find some time)

Comment by nikisweeting 1 day ago

I have never seen anyone pull off seccomp nested sandboxing of Chrome in Docker before, if you manage to figure it out please let me know!

Comment by rahimnathwani 2 days ago

So this is like using wget --mirror except that it works on pages that require javascript, right?

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

Yeah, it is. For example, openai.com is rendered with Next.js, so I will try to mirror it tomorrow.

Comment by ralferoo 1 day ago

It sounds like a nice idea, but "It drives a real browser, lets the page finish doing whatever it does, grabs the finished result, and then rips every script out of it." sounds like it'd fail for a lot of websites that do things like display some kind of modal banner inviting you to click something to close it, and that prevents scrolling while that is open, whilst also delaying loading the rest of the article until a certain scroll point is hit.

Comment by coffeecoders 2 days ago

I've accumulated a bunch of old website archives over the years. The funny thing is the ugly HTML dumps have been more useful than the "perfect" archive.

It's one of the reasons I've become a bigger fan of RSS over time. A feed from 10-ish years ago is often more usable today than a carefully preserved (application) website.

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

I have a project for creating and archiving RSS feeds, keeping the full history from the time the crawler starts. I need to clean up a bit, then will open source it soon.

Comment by couscouspie 1 day ago

Maybe it is just me, but by far most of the time, when I want to archive something from the internet, it is information and information is best served in an absolutely minimal text format like html or md.

Comment by b0dhimind 13 hours ago

I've had a subscription to this site: app.dancevision.com for a while. It requires cookies to login and view and each video (3 directories down) is hosted on Vimeo. Could Kage actually do an offline mirror of the site (and the videos)?

Comment by shinryuu 2 days ago

Reminds me of this. https://gwern.net/gwtar

Compared to that is there anything kage does better?

Comment by soulofmischief 2 days ago

Cool project! I know it's written in go, but it would be cool to see something like this which uses Cosmopolitan Libc + redbean or something similar to create a binary which runs anywhere. Would be fun to be able to pass around self-executable website archives.

https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/index.html

https://redbean.dev

(Certificates just expired for justine's website, just ignore the warning.)

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

This could be a nice code golf project. It only needs a webview, a ZIM reader, and a way to append data to an existing binary and read it back.

I did something like that a very long time ago (Of course, I have forgotten)

Comment by jokethrowaway 2 days ago

I never understood the appeal for cosmopolitan.

I'd rather have platform specific minimal binaries than a single binary with hacks.

Installing packages is a solved problem

Comment by soulofmischief 2 days ago

Installing packages is a completely different activity than passing around self-executable archives among friends. Not everything needs to go through a CI pipeline and distribution platform before you can share it with others. On top of that, I really enjoy being able to write quick little utilities and then pass them around without worrying about what operating system anyone who stumbles upon it has.

It's fine if you don't personally find it useful for your workflow, but I think it's mad cool, especially since you can zip together multiple binaries into one, along with data.

Comment by jokethrowaway 2 days ago

Amazing stuff!

I would recommend an add-on or new feature to detect and remove cookie banners / annoying popups that open on load (eg. sign up to my mailing list).

listing a few examples form fastText could help you.

You might also have the opposite problem though: some websites have content in the base html (so it's searchable by Google and they get views) and remove it on load (so you have to pay).

Capturing the initial html and comparing it to the final version could give you some hints and allow you to repair the removed content.

Best of luck with the project!

Comment by kadhirvelm 2 days ago

This is awesome, we wanted an offline copy of someone’s prototype (as built on Lovable, etc) so we could do version control and sharing in an easier format. Wrote our approach here: https://productnow.ai/blogs/extracting-html-from-ai-prototyp...

But will look into this now, see if we can swap some stuff out. We’ve really liked the idea of an offline mirror, makes a lot of collaboration use cases simpler

Comment by lolpython 2 days ago

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

Comment by sanqui 2 days ago

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.

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

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

Comment by sanqui 2 days ago

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.

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

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!

Comment by sanqui 2 days ago

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!

Comment by Prime_Axiom 2 days ago

Looking forward to the next project! I love these kinds of archiving tools.

Comment by threecheese 2 days ago

OK, sounds fascinating; following! (your GH)

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

Thanks ;)

Comment by Dhavidh 2 days ago

sound interesting

Comment by sails 2 days ago

What is the best way to give coding agent a full website so that it can see what I see? With animation and design I’m never sure what it gets when I save the website in the browser. Maybe this is suitable?

Comment by Igor_Wiwi 2 days ago

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

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by amatecha 2 days ago

Suddenly remembering the days of dialup and your browser serving a fully-functional cached copy of a webpage when you try to access it and you're not online...

Comment by cynicalsecurity 2 days ago

Binary app is a really bad way of storing data. No one would ever want to run a binary shared with them or found online.

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

For sharing, better use the html folder or zim format, Kage supports both of them.

Comment by sablekit 22 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by carsonye 2 days ago

This is interesting. Is the intended use case mostly read-only websites like blogs/docs/essays? How well does it handle sites where navigation, search, dropdowns, or other UI interactions depend on JavaScript?

Comment by tamnd 1 day ago

Currently, all of that is broken. At one point, I had a traumatic experience where an archived HTML file kept redirecting to the live site, even though I already had all the content rendered, so I ended up disabling all JavaScript entirely.

Comment by tamnd 1 day ago

If there's more demand for that, maybe I will implement a more relaxed version.

Comment by jyscao 2 days ago

I tried to clone a HTTP (not HTTPS) site, and it's giving me `navigation failed: net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED`. Even when I explicitly included the protocol with `http://<FQDN>`.

Comment by chinnyys 2 days ago

The readme is AI slop, and incredibly grating to read. The disgust I felt while reading it almost put me off trying the project.

Is the code also AI slop?

Comment by Sathwickp 1 day ago

I'm still trying to cope with your github profile, 68k commits a year is crazyy

Comment by godot 2 days ago

the readme uses paulgraham.com as an example (which is text articles mostly) and I never use "Save As" for a web page (for the reasons the author states), I always just print as PDF and save the PDF file.

for an entire website though of many pages I can see this can be useful.

Comment by c7b 2 days ago

Probably a stupid question, but could this archive embedded videos as well?

Comment by tamnd 1 day ago

Possible, but currently I disable all large files, including videos.

For video downloading, I suggest wrapping around yt-dlp. It's an awesome tool.

Comment by calrizien 2 days ago

Does this work for the Apple Docs website? Really tricky to get those offline.

Comment by tamnd 2 days ago

Making docs available offline was one of my main motivations for building this tool. I will try Apple Docs too.

I previously downloaded the Snowflake docs, and it was something like tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages, I do not remember exactly. The output ended up being very large.

By the way, I forgot to add zstd compression support to my ZIM reader/writer. I will implement that in the next version.

Comment by tamnd 1 day ago

Good news for you: here is the command to clone Apple Docs:

```bash bin/kage clone https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ \ --scope-prefix /documentation/ \ --out /Users/apple/data/apple-docs \ --chrome "/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome" \ --max-pages 0 --max-depth 0 \ --workers 3 --browser-pages 3 --asset-workers 6 \ --render-timeout 60s --settle 2s --timeout 30s \ 2>&1 | tee -a /Users/apple/apple-docs.log ```

Adjust it to your needs :)

I smoke-tested it, and all the content and CSS work, but I stripped all the JS, so the sidebar won't work.

If you run into any problems, feel free to create new issues in the repo. It helps me prioritize and know what should be fixed.

Comment by Departed7405 1 day ago

What's the advantage compared to mhtml?

Comment by nitotm 2 days ago

I was looking for something like this the other day, it can be very helpful.

Comment by smusamashah 2 days ago

What if I wanted to download all Confluence docs at work?

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by daviding 2 days ago

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.`

Comment by rickylin 2 days ago

It seems like https://github.com/tw93/pake is better.

Comment by italiancheese 2 days ago

Both of these projects have completely different purposes and use cases.

Have you even read the first line of the readme of the project you're commenting on?

Comment by KellyCriterion 2 days ago

Sounds like .MCH-files re-invented? (-:

Comment by endorphine 2 days ago

Anyone remembers Teleport Pro?

Comment by G_o_D 2 days ago

How its different then MHTML ??

Comment by chfritz 2 days ago

how is this different from using puppeteer to load the page and save the DOM as HTML?

Comment by sneak 2 days ago

The README is LLM slop. This makes me assume the code is the same.

Comment by snowflaxxx 1 day ago

Meet Teleport Pro

Comment by kjmh 1 day ago

I was floored by the idea of browsing docs offline but disappointed that recreating the demo of archiving Paul Graham’s essays gave me a ZIM with broken images and broken Unicode symbols when viewed in Kiwix.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by ekianjo 1 day ago

Curious about "keep it for a decade" claim. Can something possibly break down the road?

Comment by Onavo 2 days ago

How does it handle websites with client side paywalls? Can you run it with extensions like bypass paywalls and ublock origin?

Comment by delduca 2 days ago

curl can do this

Comment by grahamstanes17 2 days ago

nice

Comment by aa-jv 1 day ago

I've been using "Print to PDF" as my principle bookmarks management tool, since 1998, and I have over 90,000+ such PDF's sitting on my system, easily re-read and discovered.

So I don't quite get whats the point of kage? What does it do that print-to-PDF won't already do? The resulting .pdf's contain all the content, and also include the original URL and creation date, etc. How is kage an improvement?