sbot

Simple Archiver Bot -- a suckless web archiver written in C.

sbot creates self-contained archives of web pages and entire websites. Every resource -- CSS, images, fonts, scripts -- is fetched and inlined directly into the HTML as base64 data URIs. The result is a single file (or directory of files) that renders perfectly offline, with no external dependencies, forever.

Why

Web pages disappear. Link rot is real. The average web page has a half-life of about two years. Bookmarks break, articles vanish, references evaporate.

sbot solves this by creating archives that are:

• Self-contained. Everything is inlined. No external requests needed.
• Human-readable. Output is standard HTML. Open it in any browser.
• Permanent. No database, no server, no special viewer. Just files.
• Metadata-rich. GWTAR headers record provenance, date, and source.

Modes

Single Page Archive

sbot https://example.com/article

Archives a single page in GWTAR format (Gwern Web Tar Archive). This is the default mode and the most common use case. The output is one .gwtar.html file containing:

• A GWTAR metadata header (HTML comment) with title, source URL, domain, author, archive date, and generator version
• The full HTML with all CSS stylesheets inlined as <style> blocks
• All images, fonts, and media encoded as data: URIs
• A completely self-contained document that renders identically to the original

GWTAR format is ideal for:

• Archiving individual articles, blog posts, and essays
• Preserving references and citations
• Building a personal web archive / digital library
• Saving pages before they disappear behind paywalls or get deleted

Whole Site Archive

sbot -r https://example.com

Recursively crawls an entire website and archives every page. The output is a directory tree that mirrors the site structure, with each page saved as a self-contained HTML file. Internal links are rewritten to relative paths so navigation works offline.

Features:

• BFS crawl order. Breadth-first traversal ensures important pages (closer to root) are archived first.
• Same-domain only. Never follows links to external sites.
• robots.txt compliance. Respects Disallow rules and Crawl-delay directives by default. Override with -R.
• Depth control. Set maximum crawl depth with -d to limit scope.
• Rate limiting. Configurable delay between requests to be polite to servers (default: 1 second).
• Progress reporting. Periodic status lines showing pages archived, queue depth, and elapsed time.
• Graceful degradation. Failed resources are skipped; the crawl continues.

This mode is ideal for:

• Archiving entire blogs or documentation sites
• Creating offline mirrors of reference material
• Preserving small-to-medium websites wholesale
• Building browseable offline copies of sites you depend on

Usage

usage: sbot [-vrR] [-d depth] [-o dir] [-a author] url

  -v          verbose output
  -r          recursive (crawl entire site)
  -R          ignore robots.txt
  -d depth    max crawl depth (default: 5)
  -o dir      output directory
  -a author   site author name

Examples

# Archive a single article
sbot https://example.com/blog/post

# Archive with author metadata
sbot -a "John Doe" https://example.com/article

# Crawl a blog, max depth 3
sbot -r -d 3 https://blog.example.com

# Verbose crawl to custom directory
sbot -v -r -o ./my-archive https://docs.example.com

# Crawl ignoring robots.txt restrictions
sbot -r -R https://example.com

GWTAR Format

Every archived page includes a GWTAR (Gwern Web Tar Archive) metadata header as an HTML comment at the top of the file:

<!--
================================================================
  GWTAR ARCHIVE
================================================================

  Title:        Example Article
  Source URL:   https://example.com/article
  Domain:       example.com
  Author:       John Doe

  Archived by:  Kris Yotam
  Archived on:  krisyotam.com
  Archive date: 2026-02-14

  Generator:    sbot/0.3.0
  Format:       GWTAR (Gwern Web Tar Archive)

================================================================
-->

This header provides full provenance tracking: what was archived, where it came from, who archived it, and when.

Resource Inlining

sbot inlines all resources to create truly self-contained archives:

Resource Type	Inlining Method
CSS stylesheets	Fetched and inserted as <style> blocks
Images	Base64-encoded as data:image/* URIs
Fonts	Base64-encoded as data:font/* URIs
Other media	Base64-encoded with appropriate MIME type

Resources that fail to fetch are silently skipped -- the archive degrades gracefully rather than failing entirely.

Build

Requires libcurl development headers.

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S curl

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev

# Build
make

# Install to /usr/local/bin
sudo make install

# Clean
make clean

Configuration

All configuration is compile-time via config.h:

Setting	Default	Description
USER_AGENT	sbot/0.3	HTTP User-Agent string
CONNECT_TIMEOUT	30s	Connection timeout
REQUEST_TIMEOUT	60s	Total request timeout
MAX_REDIRECTS	10	Maximum HTTP redirects to follow
MAX_DEPTH	5	Default recursive crawl depth
RATE_LIMIT_MS	1000ms	Delay between requests
MAX_FILE_SIZE	50 MB	Maximum size per resource
OUTPUT_EXT	.gwtar.html	File extension for archives

Edit config.h and rebuild to change any setting. This is the suckless way -- no runtime configuration files, no environment variables, no hidden defaults.

Architecture

archiver.c   Main entry, page archiving, CSS inlining, link rewriting
crawl.c      URL queue (BFS), visited set, URL normalization
fetch.c      HTTP fetching via libcurl
parse.c      HTML parsing, resource extraction, image inlining
robots.c     robots.txt fetching, parsing, rule matching
util.c       Memory wrappers, string ops, base64, MIME types
config.h     Compile-time constants

Single external dependency: libcurl. No XML parsers, no HTML5 parsers, no JavaScript engines. The HTML parsing is deliberately simple -- regex-based extraction of src, href, and url() references. This handles the vast majority of real-world pages and keeps the codebase small and auditable.

Philosophy

sbot follows the suckless philosophy:

• Written in C99 with POSIX.1-2008
• Minimal dependencies (libcurl only)
• Configuration through config.h (edit and recompile)
• Small, readable codebase
• Does one thing well

License

MIT/X Consortium License. See LICENSE for details.