README.md

Web Remembrance Agent

This project is a lightweight web archiver which archives every webpage you visit on Mozilla Firefox.

• YouTube videos are archived as their subtitle files
• Generic websites are archived as Markdown

Documentation

System Diagram

┌────────────┐
│    Clio    │
│  (Firefox  │
│ Extension) │
└──────┬─────┘
       │
  sends URLs
       │
┌──────▼──────┐
│   Archiver  │
│ (Flask App) │
└──────┬──────┘
       │
  archives URL
  as file
       │
  ┌────▼────┐
  │ Archive │
  └─────────┘

Setup

1. Download this repository
2. Create a virtual environment
   • python -m venv .venv
3. Activate the virtual environment
   • .\.venv\Scripts\activate
4. Install the requirements
   • pip install -r requirements.txt

Deployment

This project consists of two components:

1. Clio, the Firefox extension which sends the URLs of the pages you visit to the Archiver web app
2. Archiver, the Flask app which archives the URLs that are passed to it.

Deployment requires deploying both Clio and Archiver at the same time.

Deploying Archiver

1. Activate the virtual environment
   • .\.venv\Scripts\activate
2. Start the Flask app
   • python .\app.py

Deploying Clio

1. Open Firefox
2. Navigate to about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox (in the address bar)
3. Click "Load Temporary Add-on..."
4. Navigate to the location where you have installed this repository
5. Navigate to the subfolder "clio"
   • e.g. C:\Documents\web-remembrance-agent\clio
6. Double-click on the "manifest" file

Use

If you want to see the homepage of the Archiver web app (after starting it), go to 127.0.0.1:5000.

If you want to add a new URL to archive, send a POST request to 127.0.0.1:5000/archive with the JSON request {"url": url_to_be_archived}