**ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites (it saves HTML, JS, media files, PDFs, images and more).**
You can use it to preserve access to websites you care about by storing them locally offline. ArchiveBox works by rendering the pages in a headless browser, then saving all the requests and fully loaded pages in multiple redundant common formats (HTML, PDF, PNG, WARC) that will last long after the original content disappears off the internet. It also automatically extracts assets like git repositories, audio, video, subtitles, images, and PDFs into separate files using `youtube-dl`, `pywb`, and `wget`.
ArchiveBox doesn't require a constantly running server or backend, instead you just run the `./archive` command each time you want to import new links and update the static output. It can import and export JSON (among other formats), so it's easy to script or hook up to other APIs. If you run it on a schedule and import from browser history or bookmarks regularly, you can sleep soundly knowing that the slice of the internet you care about will be automatically preserved in multiple, durable long-term formats that will be accessible for decades (or longer).
ArchiveBox has [3 main dependencies](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Install#dependencies) beyond `python3`: `wget`, `chromium`, and `youtube-dl` (all the dependencies are optional if you're ok disabling the archive methods that require them).
To install them automatically, you can use the [helper script](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Quickstart), install them [manually](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Install), or use [Docker](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Docker).
*(pip, apt, and homebrew distributions of ArchiveBox will be available in the [near future](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Roadmap))*
For more information, see the [Quickstart](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Quickstart), [Usage](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Usage), and [Configuration](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration) docs.
ArchiveBox imports a list of URLs from stdin, remote url, or file, then adds the pages to a local archive folder using wget to create a browsable html clone, youtube-dl to extract media, and a full instance of Chrome headless for PDF, Screenshot, and DOM dumps, and more...
Using multiple methods and the market-dominant browser to execute JS ensures we can save even the most complex, finicky websites in at least a few high-quality, long-term data formats.
By default it does everything, but can disable or tweak [individual options](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration) via environment variables or config file.
The archiving is additive, so you can schedule `./archive` to [run regularly](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Scheduled-Archiving) and pull new links into the index.
There are tons of great web archiving tools out there. In particular https://webrecorder.io ([pywb](https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb)) and https://getpolarized.io/ are robust, stable pieces of software that have lots of overlap with ArchiveBox. ArchiveBox differentiates itself by being primarily a one-shot CLI tool that specializing in importing streams of links from RSS, JSON (good for automatically archiving from a stream of browser history or bookmarks on a schedule), as opposed to a desktop application or web service that requires human interaction to add links.
To learn more about the motivation for this project and how it fits into the broader community, see our [Web Archiving Community](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community) wiki page.
to preserve some important parts of that treasure, just like we preserve our books, paintings, and music in physical libraries long after the originals go out of print or fade into obscurity.
The balance between the permanence and ephemeral nature of content on the internet is part of what makes it beautiful.
I don't think everything should be preserved in an automated fashion, making all content permanent and never removable, but I do think people should be able to decide for themselves and effectively archive specific content that they care about.
The aim of ArchiveBox is to go beyond what the Wayback Machine and other public archiving services can do, by adding a headless browser to replay sessions accurately, and by automatically extracting all the content in multiple redundant formats that will survive being passed down to historians and archivists through many generations.
- Learn why archiving the internet is important by reading the "[On the Importance of Web Archiving](https://parameters.ssrc.org/2018/09/on-the-importance-of-web-archiving/)" blog post.
- Discover the web archiving community on the [community](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community) wiki page.
To learn more about ArchiveBox's past history and future plans, check out the [roadmap](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Roadmap) and [changelog](https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Changelog).
