sharc

sharc is a minimalistic bookmarking tool that archives the pages locally at your device and organizes them in a simple web interface. The download of the files is only based on wget - it has no other dependencies!

Setup

To understand the logic behind the setup, it is advisable to look into the files archive, assets/main.js and setup.

In archive at the top you can see the line

dir="%dir%" && cd "$dir"

and in assets/main.js the first two lines are:

const locale = "%locale%";
const timeZone = "%timeZone%";

These are the environment variables that have to be set before you can use the program. You can either do it manually or simply run the setup script:

./setup

The script sets %dir% based on the directory you are currently in (e.g. /srv/http/archive) and %locale% and %timeZone% based respectively on your locale (e.g. en-GB) and timezone (e.g. Australia/Sydney).

Now copy archive to /usr/local/bin:

sudo cp archive /usr/local/bin

How to use

Using it is very simple and intuitive. Every time you want to archive a page, you run

archive <link>

in your terminal. This downloads the page and adds the link in links.js.

To get to the overview page, either open index.html in the browser or – if you have a web server installed locally – navigate to http://localhost/archive (or whatever your path is).

How it's organized

In addition to the date and the link, you can see a third column in the table that shows the number of snapshots of the URL.

If you click on the number, you will get to a subpage with all snapshots of the particular link.

Below that, there is a link to a subpage to see an overview of all archived URLs of the respective domain.

Hosting a sharc instance

What if you don't want to save the archive on your local machine, but on your server and make it accessible to the world, is that possible? Yes!

There are probably several ways you could do it, but here's a simple way I can recommend:

1. Download/clone the repo to a directory of choice (e.g. /var/www/html/archive) and do the setup as described above
2. Then add a file named archive on your local machine with the following content:

#!/bin/sh

ssh <user>@<hostname> "archive $1; exit"

Replace <user> with your SSH username and <hostname> with the IP or address of your site.

3. Make the file executable:

sudo chmod +x archive

4. Move the file to /usr/local/bin

sudo mv archive /usr/local/bin

That's it! Now every time you want to add a page to your archive, simply run the following command on your local machine:

archive <link>

The page will be downloaded on your server and will be publicly visible at the URL you chose above (e.g. https://example.com/archive).