Roadmap

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

Planned Specification

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

v0.5: Remove live-updated JSON & HTML index in favor of archivebox export

  • use SQLite as the main db and export staticfile indexes once at the end of the whole process instead of live-updating them during each extractor run (i.e. remove patch_main_index)
  • create archivebox export command
  • we have to create a public view to replace index.html / old.html used for non-logged in users

v0.6: Code cleanup / refactor

  • 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
  • convert all os.path calls and raw string paths to Pathlib

v0.7: Schema improvements

  • remove timestamps as primary keys in favor of hashes, UUIDs, or some other slug
  • 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

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

  • 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?)
  • 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
  • download closed-caption subtitles from Youtube and other video sites for full-text indexing of video content
  • 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: