Roadmap

▶️ Comment here to discuss the contribution roadmap:
Official Roadmap Discussion.

Planned Specification

(this is not set in stone, just a rough estimate)

v0.7: Schema improvements

  • move config loading logic into settings.py

  • move all the extractors into “plugin” style folders that register their own config

  • right now, the paths of the extractor output are scattered all over the codebase, e.g. output.pdf (should be moved to constants at the top of the plugin config file)

  • make out_dir, link_dir, extractor_dir, naming consistent across codebase

  • remove timestamps as primary keys in favor of hashes, UUIDs, or some other slug https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/issues/74

  • create a migration system for folder layout independent of the index (mv is atomic at the FS level, so we just need a transaction.atomic(): move(oldpath, newpath); snap.data_dir = newpath; snap.save())

  • make Tag a real model ManyToMany with Snapshots

  • allow multiple Snapshots of the same site over time + CLI / UI to manage those, + migration from old style #2020-01-01 hack to proper versioned snapshots

  • upgrade from Django 3 to Django 5 https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/issues/988

v0.8:  Security

  • Add CSRF/CSP/XSS protection to rendered archive pages

  • Provide secure reverse proxy in front of archivebox server in docker-compose.yml

  • Create UX flow for users to setup session cookies / auth for archiving private sites

    • cookies for wget, curl, etc low-level commands

    • localstorage, cookies, indexedb setup for chrome archiving methods

v0.9:  Performance

  • setup huey, break up archiving process into tasks on a queue that a worker pool executes

  • setup pyppeteer2 to wrap chrome so that it’s not open/closed during each extractor

v1.0: Full headless browser control

  • run user-scripts / extensions in the context of the page during archiving

  • community userscripts for unrolling twitter threads, reddit threads, youtube comment sections, etc.

  • pywb-based headless browser session recording and warc replay

  • archive proxy support

    • support sending upstream requests through an external proxy

    • support for exposing a proxy that archives all downstream traffic

…

v2.0 Federated or distributed archiving + paid hosted service offering

  • ZFS / merkel tree for storing archive output subresource hashes

  • DHT for assigning merkel tree hash:file shards to nodes

  • tag system for tagging certain hashes with human-readable names, e.g. title, url, tags, filetype etc.

  • distributed tag lookup system

Major long-term changes

  • ✅ release pip, apt, pkg, and brew packaged distributions for installing ArchiveBox

  • ✅ add an optional web GUI for managing sources, adding new links, and viewing the archive

  • ✅ switch to django + sqlite db with migrations system & json/html export for managing archive schema changes and persistence

  • modularize internals to allow importing individual components

  • switch to sha256 of URL as unique link ID

  • support storing multiple snapshots of pages over time

  • support custom user puppeteer scripts to run while archiving (e.g. for expanding reddit threads, scrolling thread on twitter, etc)

  • support named collections of archived content with different user access permissions

  • support sharing archived assets via DHT + torrent / ipfs / ZeroNet / other sharing system

Smaller planned features

  • support pushing pages to multiple 3rd party services using ArchiveNow instead of just archive.org

  • ✅ body text extraction to markdown (using ~~fathom~~ readability and mercury)

  • featured image / thumbnail extraction

  • auto-tagging links based on important/frequent keywords in extracted text (like pocket)

  • automatic article summary paragraphs from extracted text with nlp summarization library

  • ✅ full-text search of extracted text with ~~elasticsearch/elasticlunr/ag~~ sonic and ripgrep

  • ✅ download closed-caption subtitles from Youtube and other video sites (TODO: submit the subtitle files to the full-text search index)

  • try pulling dead sites from archive.org and other sources if original is down (https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader)

  • And more in the issues list…

IMPORTANT: Please don’t work on any of these major long-term tasks without contacting me first, work is already in progress for many of these, and I may have to reject your PR if it doesn’t align with the existing work!

Past Releases

To see how this spec has been scheduled / implemented / released so far, read these pull requests:

  • ✅ v0.1.x pre-git-history (~2017)

  • ✅ v0.2.x (~2018/12)

  • ✅ v0.3.x (~2019/03)

  • ✅ v0.4.x (~2019/04)

  • ✅ v0.5.x (~2020/11)

  • ✅ v0.6.x (~2021/03)

  • 🏖️ sabbatical / coding hiatus during 2022

  • ✅ v0.7.x (~2023/11)

  • 🛠 v0.8.x (~2024/05)

  • 📅 v0.9.x up next…

UI / UX Improvements Planned

New Extractors Planned

ArchiveBox Developer Documentation: Contributing a New Extractor

And others we’re considering for the future:

Social Media

Video/Streams

Audio/Music

Photos/Images/Comics

Text/Forums

MOOC/Educational Content

Re-Archiving / WARC Creation

Other