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webChronicle

Web archiver

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Version 2.0.0

The entire archiver was rewritten from Node.js to Rust. Same features, same file structure on disk, but now it’s a single static binary with no runtime dependencies.

Changed

  • Rust rewrite — the entire scraper, builder, and server are now Rust. No Node.js, no npm, no runtime. One binary.
  • Sitemap-first scraping — webChronicle now auto-discovers sitemaps (/sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /wp-sitemap.xml, etc.) before falling back to recursive crawling. You can also pass a sitemap URL directly.
  • 10-thread concurrent scraping — pages are fetched in parallel for faster runs.
  • Local-first link rewriting — all links in snapshots are rewritten to point to local copies. No broken links when browsing offline.
  • CDN image handling — images from CDN URLs are downloaded and stored locally.
  • data-src / data-srcset support — lazy-loaded images are captured correctly.
  • Overlay injection moved to serve-time — snapshots on disk are clean HTML. The overlay (archive date, back link) is injected by the server on-the-fly via Shadow DOM. Copy a snapshot folder, get the original page.
  • ledger.toml index — replaces the old JSON index. Human-readable, hand-editable.
  • Tera templates — the index page uses Tera instead of Eleventy’s Liquid.
  • System fonts — no web font requests. The UI uses system-ui and friends.

Removed

  • Node.js runtime, npm dependencies, Eleventy, .nvmrc, package.json build scripts — all gone. package.json is metadata only.
  • Filmstrip UI — replaced with a blog-style feed (domain h2, snapshots ul/li, max-width: 640px).

Install

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

./target/release/webchronicle init
./target/release/webchronicle scrape
./target/release/webchronicle build
./target/release/webchronicle serve --port 3000

Known gaps

  • @font-face declarations in CSS files are not yet parsed for local font downloading. Fonts referenced via url() in CSS are downloaded, but @font-face src URLs are not.