A self-hosted web archiving tool that captures and explores snapshots of webpages over time—like the Wayback Machine, but as your own personal Time Machine.

Live Demo | Blog Post

• Capture website snapshots — Archive any website with a single command
• Time travel through history — Browse previous versions of archived pages
• Self-hosted & private — Your archives stay on your own infrastructure
• Multiple sites support — Archive multiple domains in a single snapshot
• Recursive scraping — Automatically follow links to capture entire sites
• Overlay navigation — Injected UI shows archive date and quick navigation

# Clone and install
git clone https://github.com/reatlat/webchronicle.git
cd webchronicle
npm install

# Configure your URLs in webchronicle.config.js, then:
npm run scraper    # Capture snapshots
npm run start      # Start local server at http://localhost:8080

Edit webchronicle.config.js to specify which websites to archive:

export default {
  urls: [
    'https://example.com',
    'https://example.org',
  ],
  recursive: true,
  maxRecursiveDepth: 3,
  urlFilter: (url) => {
    return url.startsWith('https://example.com') || url.startsWith('https://example.org');
  },
};

Full configuration options available in the website-scraper documentation.

1. Configure your target URLs in webchronicle.config.js
2. Run the scraper to capture snapshots:

   npm run scraper

3. Commit your archives:

   git add ./scraped-websites
   git commit -m "Add website snapshots"
   git push

4. Deploy or run locally:

   npm run start      # Development
   npm run build      # Production build

Each snapshot is stored with a timestamp and organized by domain:

scraped-websites/
├── 2024-12-01T01-41-35/
│   ├── example.com/
│   └── example.org/
└── ledger.json

Deploy to your preferred platform:

Also compatible with Cloudflare Pages, AWS, Heroku, and Google Cloud.

• Eleventy — Static site generator
• website-scraper — Website downloading
• TailwindCSS — Styling
• esbuild — JavaScript bundling

1. Fork this repo
2. Clone: git clone git@github.com:YOUR_USERNAME/webchronicle.git
3. Create your feature branch: git checkout -b my-new-feature
4. Commit your changes: git commit -am 'Add some feature'
5. Push to the branch: git push origin my-new-feature
6. Create a Pull Request

Found a bug? Open an issue.

Special thanks to James Dancer for the inspiration behind the name.

Logo design by Tatiana Zappa.

This project is open source and available under the MIT License.