Configuration

▶️ The full ArchiveBox config file definition with defaults can be found here: archivebox/config.py.

Configuration of ArchiveBox is done by using the archivebox config command, modifying the ArchiveBox.conf file in the data folder, or by using environment variables. All three methods work equivalently when using Docker as well.

Some equivalent examples of setting some configuration options:

archivebox config --set CHROME_BINARY=google-chrome-stable
# OR
echo "CHROME_BINARY=google-chrome-stable" >> ArchiveBox.conf
# OR
env CHROME_BINARY=google-chrome-stable archivebox add ~/Downloads/bookmarks_export.html

Environment variables take precedence over the config file, which is useful if you only want to use a certain option temporarily during a single run.


Available Configuration Options:


In case this document is ever out of date, it’s recommended to read the code that loads the config directly in archivebox/config.py.


General Settings

General options around the archiving process, output format, and timing.


OUTPUT_PERMISSIONS

Possible Values: [755]/644/…
Permissions to set the output directory and file contents to.

This is useful when running ArchiveBox inside Docker as root and you need to explicitly set the permissions to something that the users on the host can access.


ONLY_NEW

Possible Values: [True]/False
Toggle whether or not to attempt rechecking old links when adding new ones, or leave old incomplete links alone and only archive the new links.

By default, ArchiveBox will only archive new links on each import. If you want it to go back through all links in the index and download any missing files on every run, set this to False.

Note: Regardless of how this is set, ArchiveBox will never re-download sites that have already succeeded previously. When this is False it only attempts to fix previous pages have missing archive extractor outputs, it does not re-archive pages that have already been successfully archived.


TIMEOUT

Possible Values: [60]/120/…
Maximum allowed download time per archive method for each link in seconds. If you have a slow network connection or are seeing frequent timeout errors, you can raise this value.

Note: Do not set this to anything less than 15 seconds as it will cause Chrome to hang indefinitely and many sites to fail completely.


MEDIA_TIMEOUT

Possible Values: [3600]/120/…
Maximum allowed download time for fetching media when SAVE_MEDIA=True in seconds. This timeout is separate and usually much longer than TIMEOUT because media downloaded with youtube-dl can often be quite large and take many minutes/hours to download. Tweak this setting based on your network speed and maximum media file size you plan on downloading.

Note: Do not set this to anything less than 10 seconds as it can often take 5-10 seconds for youtube-dl just to parse the page before it starts downloading media files.

Related options:
SAVE_MEDIA


ADMIN_USERNAME / ADMIN_PASSWORD

Possible Values: [None]/"admin"/…

Only used on first run / initial setup. ArchiveBox will create an admin user with the specified username and password when these options are found in the environment. Useful for setting up a Docker instance of ArchiveBox without needing to run a shell command to create the admin user.

Related options:
PUBLIC_INDEX


PUBLIC_INDEX / PUBLIC_SNAPSHOTS / PUBLIC_ADD_VIEW

Possible Values: [False]/True Configure whether or not login is required to use each area of ArchiveBox.

archivebox manage createsuperuser  # set a password before disabling public access

archivebox config --set PUBLIC_INDEX=False
archivebox config --set PUBLIC_SNAPSHOTS=False
archivebox config --set PUBLIC_ADD_VIEW=False

https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox#-web-ui-usage


CUSTOM_TEMPLATES_DIR

Possible Values: [None]/./path/to/custom_templates/…
Path to a directory containing custom html/css/images for overriding the default UI styling. Files found in the folder at the specified path can override any of the defaults in the TEMPLATES_DIR directory (copy files from that default dir into your custom dir to get started making a custom theme).

If you’ve used django before, this works exactly the same way that django template overrides work (because it uses django under the hood).

Related options:
FOOTER_INFO


SNAPSHOTS_PER_PAGE

Possible Values: [40]/100/…

Maximum number of Snapshots to show per page on Snapshot list pages. Lower this value on slower machines to make the UI faster.

Related options:
SEARCH_BACKEND_TIMEOUT



URL_BLACKLIST

Possible Values: [\.(css|js|otf|ttf|woff|woff2|gstatic\.com|googleapis\.com/css)(\?.*)?$]/.+\.exe$/http(s)?:\/\/(.+)?example.com\/.*/…

A regex expression used to exclude certain URLs from archiving. You can use if there are certain domains, extensions, or other URL patterns that you want to ignore whenever they get imported. Blacklisted URLs wont be included in the index, and their page content wont be archived.

When building your exclusion list, you can check whether a given URL matches your regex expression in python like so:

>>> import re
>>> URL_BLACKLIST = r'^http(s)?:\/\/(.+\.)?(youtube\.com)|(amazon\.com)\/.*$'  # replace this with your regex to test
>>> URL_BLACKLIST_PTN = re.compile(URL_BLACKLIST, re.IGNORECASE | re.UNICODE | re.MULTILINE)

>>> bool(URL_BLACKLIST_PTN.search('https://test.youtube.com/example.php?abc=123'))  # replace this with the URL to test
True   # this URL would not be archived because it matches the exclusion pattern

Note: all assets required to render each page are still archived, URL_BLACKLIST/URL_WHITELIST do not apply to images, css, video, etc. visible inline within the page.

Note 2: I named these options poorly years ago when I added them and I plan to rename them to URL_ALLOWLIST & URL_DENYLIST in a future release.

Related options:
URL_WHITELIST, SAVE_MEDIA, SAVE_GIT, GIT_DOMAINS


URL_WHITELIST

Possible Values: [None]/^http(s)?:\/\/(.+)?example\.com\/?.*$/…

A regex expression used to exclude all URLs that don’t match the given pattern from archiving. You can use if there are certain domains, extensions, or other URL patterns that you want to restrict the scope of archiving to (e.g. to only archive a single domain, subdirectory, or filetype, etc..

When building your whitelist, you can check whether a given URL matches your regex expression in python like so:

>>> import re
>>> URL_WHITELIST = r'^http(s)?:\/\/(.+)?example\.com\/?.*$'  # replace this with your regex to test
>>> URL_WHITELIST_PTN = re.compile(URL_WHITELIST, re.IGNORECASE | re.UNICODE | re.MULTILINE)

>>> bool(URL_WHITELIST_PTN.search('https://test.example.com/example.php?abc=123'))
True      # this URL would be archived

>>> bool(URL_WHITELIST_PTN.search('https://test.youtube.com/example.php?abc=123'))
False     # this URL would be excluded from archiving

This option is useful for recursive archiving of all the pages under a given domain or subfolder (aka crawling/spidering), without following links to external domains / parent folders.

# temporarily enforce a whitelist by setting the option as an environment variable
export URL_WHITELIST='^http(s)?:\/\/(.+)?example\.com\/?.*$'

# then run your archivebox commands in the same shell
archivebox add --depth=1 'https://example.com'
archivebox list https://example.com | archivebox add --depth=1
archivebox list https://example.com | archivebox add --depth=1
archivebox list https://example.com | archivebox add --depth=1   # repeat up to desired depth
...
# all URLs that don't match *.example.com will be excluded, e.g. a link to youtube.com would not be followed

Note: all assets required to render each page are still archived, URL_BLACKLIST/URL_WHITELIST do not apply to images, css, video, etc. visible inline within the page.

Related options:
URL_BLACKLIST, SAVE_MEDIA, SAVE_GIT, GIT_DOMAINS


Archive Method Toggles

High-level on/off switches for all the various methods used to archive URLs.


SAVE_TITLE

Possible Values: [True]/False
By default ArchiveBox uses the title provided by the import file, but not all types of imports provide titles (e.g. Plain texts lists of URLs). When this is True, ArchiveBox downloads the page (and follows all redirects), then it attempts to parse the link’s title from the first <title></title> tag found in the response. It may be buggy or not work for certain sites that use JS to set the title, disabling it will lead to links imported without a title showing up with their URL as the title in the UI.

Related options:
ONLY_NEW, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY


SAVE_FAVICON

Possible Values: [True]/False
Fetch and save favicon for the URL from Google’s public favicon service: https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain={domain}. Set this to FALSE if you don’t need favicons.

Related options:
TEMPLATES_DIR, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CURL_BINARY


SAVE_WGET

Possible Values: [True]/False
Fetch page with wget, and save responses into folders for each domain, e.g. example.com/index.html, with .html appended if not present. For a full list of options used during the wget download process, see the archivebox/archive_methods.py:save_wget(...) function.

Related options:
TIMEOUT, SAVE_WGET_REQUISITES, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, COOKIES_FILE, WGET_USER_AGENT, SAVE_WARC, WGET_BINARY


SAVE_WARC

Possible Values: [True]/False
Save a timestamped WARC archive of all the page requests and responses during the wget archive process.

Related options:
TIMEOUT, SAVE_WGET_REQUISITES, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, COOKIES_FILE, WGET_USER_AGENT, SAVE_WGET, WGET_BINARY


SAVE_PDF

Possible Values: [True]/False
Print page as PDF.

Related options:
TIMEOUT, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR, CHROME_BINARY


SAVE_SCREENSHOT

Possible Values: [True]/False
Fetch a screenshot of the page.

Related options:
RESOLUTION, TIMEOUT, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR, CHROME_BINARY


SAVE_DOM

Possible Values: [True]/False
Fetch a DOM dump of the page.

Related options:
TIMEOUT, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR, CHROME_BINARY


SAVE_SINGLEFILE

Possible Values: [True]/False
Fetch an HTML file with all assets embedded using Single File.

Related options:
TIMEOUT, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR, CHROME_BINARY, SINGLEFILE_BINARY


SAVE_READABILITY

Possible Values: [True]/False
Extract article text, summary, and byline using Mozilla’s Readability library. Unlike the other methods, this does not download any additional files, so it’s practically free from a disk usage perspective. It works by using any existing downloaded HTML version (e.g. wget, DOM dump, singlefile) and piping it into readability.

Related options:
TIMEOUT, SAVE_WGET, SAVE_DOM, SAVE_SINGLEFILE, SAVE_MERCURY


SAVE_MERCURY

Possible Values: [True]/False
Extract article text, summary, and byline using the Mercury library. Unlike the other methods, this does not download any additional files, so it’s practically free from a disk usage perspective. It works by using any existing downloaded HTML version (e.g. wget, DOM dump, singlefile) and piping it into Mercury.

Related options:
TIMEOUT, SAVE_WGET, SAVE_DOM, SAVE_SINGLEFILE, SAVE_READABILITY


SAVE_GIT

Possible Values: [True]/False
Fetch any git repositories on the page.

Related options:
TIMEOUT, GIT_DOMAINS, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, GIT_BINARY


SAVE_MEDIA

Possible Values: [True]/False
Fetch all audio, video, annotations, and media metadata on the page using youtube-dl. Warning, this can use up a lot of storage very quickly.

Related options:
MEDIA_TIMEOUT, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, YOUTUBEDL_BINARY


SAVE_ARCHIVE_DOT_ORG

Possible Values: [True]/False
Submit the page’s URL to be archived on Archive.org. (The Internet Archive)

Related options:
TIMEOUT, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CURL_BINARY


Archive Method Options

Specific options for individual archive methods above. Some of these are shared between multiple archive methods, others are specific to a single method.


CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY

Possible Values: [True]/False
Whether to enforce HTTPS certificate and HSTS chain of trust when archiving sites. Set this to False if you want to archive pages even if they have expired or invalid certificates. Be aware that when False you cannot guarantee that you have not been man-in-the-middle’d while archiving content, so the content cannot be verified to be what’s on the original site.


SAVE_WGET_REQUISITES

Possible Values: [True]/False
Fetch images/css/js with wget. (True is highly recommended, otherwise your won’t download many critical assets to render the page, like images, js, css, etc.)

Related options:
TIMEOUT, SAVE_WGET, SAVE_WARC, WGET_BINARY


RESOLUTION

Possible Values: [1440,2000]/1024,768/…
Screenshot resolution in pixels width,height.

Related options:
SAVE_SCREENSHOT


CURL_USER_AGENT

Possible Values: [Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.61 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/{VERSION} (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/{CURL_VERSION}]/"Mozilla/5.0 ..."/…
This is the user agent to use during curl archiving. You can set this to impersonate a more common browser like Chrome or Firefox if you’re getting blocked by servers for having an unknown/blacklisted user agent.

Related options:
USE_CURL, SAVE_TITLE, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CURL_BINARY, WGET_USER_AGENT, CHROME_USER_AGENT


WGET_USER_AGENT

Possible Values: [Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.61 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/{VERSION} (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/{WGET_VERSION}]/"Mozilla/5.0 ..."/…
This is the user agent to use during wget archiving. You can set this to impersonate a more common browser like Chrome or Firefox if you’re getting blocked by servers for having an unknown/blacklisted user agent.

Related options:
SAVE_WGET, SAVE_WARC, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, WGET_BINARY, CHROME_USER_AGENT


CHROME_USER_AGENT

Possible Values: [Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.61 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/{VERSION} (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/)]/"Mozilla/5.0 ..."/…

This is the user agent to use during Chrome headless archiving. If you’re experiencing being blocked by many sites, you can set this to hide the Headless string that reveals to servers that you’re using a headless browser.

Related options:
SAVE_PDF, SAVE_SCREENSHOT, SAVE_DOM, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR, CHROME_HEADLESS, CHROME_BINARY, WGET_USER_AGENT


GIT_DOMAINS

Possible Values: [github.com,bitbucket.org,gitlab.com]/git.example.com/…
Domains to attempt download of git repositories on using git clone.

Related options:
SAVE_GIT, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY


COOKIES_FILE

Possible Values: [None]//path/to/cookies.txt/…
Cookies file to pass to wget. To capture sites that require a user to be logged in, you can specify a path to a netscape-format cookies.txt file for wget to use. You can generate this file by using a browser extension to export your cookies in this format, or by using wget with --save-cookies.

Related options:
SAVE_WGET, SAVE_WARC, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, WGET_BINARY


CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR

Possible Values: [~/.config/google-chrome]//tmp/chrome-profile/…
Path to a Chrome user profile directory. To capture sites that require a user to be logged in, you can specify a path to a chrome user profile (which loads the cookies needed for the user to be logged in). If you don’t have an existing Chrome profile, create one with chromium-browser --user-data-dir=/tmp/chrome-profile, and log into the sites you need. Then set CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR=/tmp/chrome-profile to make ArchiveBox use that profile.

Note: Make sure the path does not have Default at the end (it should the the parent folder of Default), e.g. set it to CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR=~/.config/chromium and not CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR=~/.config/chromium/Default.

By default when set to None, ArchiveBox tries all the following User Data Dir paths in order:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/user_data_dir.md

Related options:
SAVE_PDF, SAVE_SCREENSHOT, SAVE_DOM, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CHROME_HEADLESS, CHROME_BINARY


CHROME_HEADLESS

Possible Values: [True]/False
Whether or not to use Chrome/Chromium in --headless mode (no browser UI displayed). When set to False, the full Chrome UI will be launched each time it’s used to archive a page, which greatly slows down the process but allows you to watch in real-time as it saves each page.

Related options:
SAVE_PDF, SAVE_SCREENSHOT, SAVE_DOM, CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR, CHROME_BINARY


CHROME_SANDBOX

Possible Values: [True]/False
Whether or not to use the Chrome sandbox when archiving.

If you see an error message like this, it means you are trying to run ArchiveBox as root:

:ERROR:zygote_host_impl_linux.cc(89)] Running as root without --no-sandbox is not supported. See https://crbug.com/638180

*Note: Do not run ArchiveBox as root! The solution to this error is not to override it by setting CHROME_SANDBOX=False, it’s to use create another user (e.g. www-data) and run ArchiveBox under that new, less privileged user. This is a security-critical setting, only set this to False if you’re running ArchiveBox inside a container or VM where it doesn’t have access to the rest of your system!

Related options:
SAVE_PDF, SAVE_SCREENSHOT, SAVE_DOM, CHECK_SSL_VALIDITY, CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR, CHROME_HEADLESS, CHROME_BINARY


Shell Options

Options around the format of the CLI output.


USE_COLOR

Possible Values: [True]/False
Colorize console output. Defaults to True if stdin is a TTY (interactive session), otherwise False (e.g. if run in a script or piped into a file).


SHOW_PROGRESS

Possible Values: [True]/False
Show real-time progress bar in console output. Defaults to True if stdin is a TTY (interactive session), otherwise False (e.g. if run in a script or piped into a file).

Note: We use asymptotic progress bars because most tasks complete quickly! ✨


Dependency Options

Options for defining which binaries to use for the various archive method dependencies.


CHROME_BINARY

Possible Values: [chromium-browser]//usr/local/bin/google-chrome/…
Path or name of the Google Chrome / Chromium binary to use for all the headless browser archive methods.

Without setting this environment variable, ArchiveBox by default look for the following binaries in $PATH in this order:

  • chromium-browser

  • chromium

  • google-chrome

  • google-chrome-stable

  • google-chrome-unstable

  • google-chrome-beta

  • google-chrome-canary

  • google-chrome-dev

You can override the default behavior to search for any available bin by setting the environment variable to your preferred Chrome binary name or path.

The chrome/chromium dependency is optional and only required for screenshots, PDF, and DOM dump output, it can be safely ignored if those three methods are disabled.

Related options:
SAVE_PDF, SAVE_SCREENSHOT, SAVE_DOM, SAVE_SINGLEFILE, CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR, CHROME_HEADLESS, CHROME_SANDBOX


WGET_BINARY

Possible Values: [wget]//usr/local/bin/wget/…
Path or name of the wget binary to use.

Related options:
SAVE_WGET, SAVE_WARC


YOUTUBEDL_BINARY

Possible Values: [youtube-dl]//usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/…
Path or name of the youtube-dl binary to use.

Related options:
SAVE_MEDIA


GIT_BINARY

Possible Values: [git]//usr/local/bin/git/…
Path or name of the git binary to use.

Related options:
SAVE_GIT


CURL_BINARY

Possible Values: [curl]//usr/local/bin/curl/…
Path or name of the curl binary to use.

Related options:
SAVE_FAVICON, SAVE_ARCHIVE_DOT_ORG


SINGLEFILE_BINARY

Possible Values: [single-file]/./node_modules/single-file/cli/single-file/…
Path or name of the SingleFile binary to use.

This can be installed using npm install --no-audit --no-fund 'git+https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile.git'.

Related options:
SAVE_SINGLEFILE, CHROME_BINARY, CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR, CHROME_HEADLESS, CHROME_SANDBOX


READABILITY_BINARY

Possible Values: [readability-extractor]/./node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor/…
Path or name of the Readability extrator binary to use.

This can be installed using npm install --no-audit --no-fund 'git+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/readability-extractor.git'.

Related options:
SAVE_READABILITY


MERCURY_BINARY

Possible Values: [mercury-parser]/./node_modules/@postlight/mercury-parser/cli.js/…
Path or name of the Mercury parser extractor binary to use.

This can be installed using npm install --no-audit --no-fund '@postlight/mercury-parser'.

Related options:
SAVE_MERCURY


RIPGREP_BINARY

Possible Values: [rg]/rga/…

Path or name of the ripgrep binary to use for full text search.

This can be installed using your system package manager, e.g. apt install ripgrep or brew install ripgrep.

Optionally switch this to use ripgrep-all for full-text search support across more filetypes (e.g. PDF): https://github.com/phiresky/ripgrep-all.

Related options:
SEARCH_BACKEND_ENGINE


SINGLEFILE_ARGS

Possible Values: [["--back-end=playwright-firefox","--load-deferred-images-dispatch-scroll-event=true"]]/..

Arguments that are passed to the SingleFile binary. The values should be a valid JSON string.

Related options:
SINGLEFILE_BINARY


CURL_ARGS

Possible Values: [["--tlsv1.3","--http2"]]/..

Arguments that are passed to the curl binary. The values should be a valid JSON string.

Related options:
CURL_BINARY


WGET_ARGS

Possible Values: [["--https-only"]]/..

Arguments that are passed to the wget binary. The values should be a valid JSON string.

Related options:
WGET_BINARY


YOUTUBEDL_ARGS

Possible Values: [["--limit-rate=10M"]]/..

Arguments that are passed to the youtube-dl binary. The values should be a valid JSON string.

Related options:
YOUTUBEDL_BINARY


GIT_ARGS

Possible Values: [["--depth=1"]]

Arguments that are passed to the git clone subcommand. The values should be a valid JSON string.

Related options:
GIT_BINARY

[]: