Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing

maxloh

I find SingleFile [0] to be a much more robust version of this. It strips out all the JavaScript too, but also packs everything into a single HTML file that is easy to transfer. Binary assets (like web fonts and images) are packed as base64 strings. They also offer a CLI powered by Puppeteer. [1] [0]: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/singlefile [1]: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli

gregwebs

This seems like it has potential to create a lot of load on a site- are there settings to set how fast it clones or avoid images/videos? Is there a way to only get a subset of a website?

sanqui

Cool concept. I would like to see this combined with mitmproxy for archive grade fidelity. You could be saving exactly the data served and at the same time a representation by a modern (contemporary) browser, with all JS having run. This combination would be my perfect replacement for the WARC format.

rahimnathwani

So this is like using wget --mirror except that it works on pages that require javascript, right?

wolttam

One use I'd have for this is company wikis that you want to give folks easy offline access to (maybe the wiki has documentation that's useful at sites that don't have cellular coverage). Cool! It would be especially cool to have a version that didn't require the separate serving process - even though it's nifty you can package up a whole site as a single binary. Maybe a single HTML entrypoint shim with a bit of javascript that could index into an archive (potentially embedded) of the site's content?

dimiprasakis

Neat project, I like the idea. One thing from a quick read: you launch Chrome with --no-sandbox. Is there a good reason for that? Security wise it's probably not a good idea. If there is no reason, I'd suggest leaving the sandbox on! In any case, cool stuff :)

lolpython

This is cool. I could see myself downloading the articles behind the first couple pages of hacker news with this, for viewing on a flight or long distance train ride with spotty internet

daviding

Nice idea! fwiw, false positives and all, but the Windows 11 default Windows Security doesn't like it: `leakless.exe: Operation did not complete successfully because the file contains a virus or potentially unwanted software.`

delduca

curl can do this

Igor_Wiwi

This is quite useful tool, especially for the cases where internet access is limited (the flights for example). I implemented it as a separate feature in mdview.io: for example you can export a document as a html file for offline usage, with all the presentation features like reach tables, mermaid and etc built in. Example https://mdview.io/s/why-markdown-became-default-format-for-a... then try to Export - Export HTML

telesilla

I've been using httrack ( https://www.httrack.com ) to download wikis to read on flights, which isn't perfect but better than I'd found previously. I'll try this out, I'd be delighted to have good results. Thanks for the post.

latexr

For those with an eReader, one thing that works really well is using pandoc to download and convert a webpage to EPUB that you can then load to your reader. pandoc --from html --to epub --output /PATH/TO/FILE.epub https://example.com

ninalanyon

> kage serve $HOME/data/kage/paulgraham.com If the result is static why does it need a server? Isn't it possible to make it so that it can simply be opened by the browser? Like: $ firefox $HOME/data/kage/paulgraham.com Then the result would be useable on machines without kage nstalled.

simonw

I was intrigued to see how the demo GIF in the README was generated: https://github.com/tamnd/kage/blob/01e75b87ecc893bbba7943c63... Turns out it's using another project by the same author: https://github.com/tamnd/ascii-gif The script used for the demo is at https://github.com/tamnd/kage/blob/01e75b87ecc893bbba7943c63... and has a comment showing how to run it: ascii-gif render docs/demo/kage.tape -o docs/static/demo.gif Looks like it's an opinionated wrapper around https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs

chinnyys

The readme is AI slop, and incredibly grating to read. The disgust I felt while reading it almost put me off trying the project. Is the code also AI slop?

shinryuu

Reminds me of this. https://gwern.net/gwtar Compared to that is there anything kage does better?

soulofmischief

Cool project! I know it's written in go, but it would be cool to see something like this which uses Cosmopolitan Libc + redbean or something similar to create a binary which runs anywhere. Would be fun to be able to pass around self-executable website archives. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/index.html https://redbean.dev (Certificates just expired for justine's website, just ignore the warning.)

KellyCriterion

Sounds like .MCH-files re-invented? (-:

Onavo

How does it handle websites with client side paywalls? Can you run it with extensions like bypass paywalls and ublock origin?