webChronicle

A web archiver that runs on your machine. Save snapshots of websites and browse them later, offline, the way they looked on the day you saved them.

Features

• Archive any website with one command
• Browse previous versions of pages you've saved
• Nothing leaves your computer. No cloud, no uploads, no telemetry
• Multiple domains in one snapshot
• Recursive scraping (follows links to grab whole sites)
• Overlay with archive date and back link (injected on-the-fly, snapshots stay clean)

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/freshjuice-dev/webchronicle.git
cd webchronicle
cargo build --release

./target/release/webchronicle init
# edit webchronicle.toml, add your URLs
./target/release/webchronicle scrape
./target/release/webchronicle build
./target/release/webchronicle serve --port 3000

Configuration

Edit webchronicle.toml:

Option 1: let webChronicle find the sitemap

[site]
title = "webChronicle"
description = "A web archiver that runs on your machine"
base_url = "https://webchronicle.app"

[scraper]
urls = ["https://example.com"]
recursive = true
max_depth = 3

webChronicle tries common sitemap locations (/sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /wp-sitemap.xml, etc.). If found, it scrapes every URL listed. If not, it falls back to recursive link crawling.

Option 2: point to a sitemap directly

[site]
title = "webChronicle"
description = "A web archiver that runs on your machine"
base_url = "https://webchronicle.app"

[scraper]
urls = ["https://example.com/sitemap.xml"]
recursive = false

When the URL itself is a sitemap, webChronicle parses it and scrapes every page listed. No guessing, no crawling.

Snapshots land in scraped-websites/ with a timestamp folder per domain, plus a ledger.toml index:

scraped-websites/
├── 2025-01-15T10-30-00/
│   ├── example.com/
│   │   └── index.html
│   └── example.org/
│       └── index.html
└── ledger.toml

Snapshot files stay clean. The overlay (archive date, back link) is injected by the server when serving, not baked into the HTML. Copy a snapshot folder, get the original page.

Tech

Rust binary. Tera templates for the index page. System fonts, no frameworks.

Contributing

Fork, branch, PR. Found a bug? Open an issue.

Credits

Logo by Tatiana Zappa.

License

Copyright (C) 2024-2026 FreshJuice. Released under AGPL v3 or later.

Need a commercial license? Contact contact@freshjuice.dev.