How to set up your own article archiving service - and why I did (RIP, Pocket)

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Now that Pocket is shutting down, what are those of us who rely on article archiving to do? You could try switching to another cloud archiving service like Raindrop.io, but as nice a service as it is, it’s run by just one dude in Kazakhstan.

If a billion-dollar company like Mozilla can’t be bothered to keep its Pocket archiving service running, it’s something of a risk to rely on a lone developer, no matter how talented or well-intentioned.

Instead, how about self-hosting your own article archiving service on your own computer gear? That way, you own it all and nobody can shut it down.

Also: Pocket is shutting down – here’s how to retrieve what little data you still can

As it turns out, there’s an open-source project (of course there is!) called ArchiveBox that does just that. In this article, I’ll show you how to set it up. In a subsequent article, I’ll show you how to get whatever data you managed to recover from Pocket into ArchiveBox.

Table of contents

1 Where you can run ArchiveBox

2 Installing ArchiveBox

3 Creating the superuser

4 Archiving pages via the web interface

5 Archiving pages via Chrome extension

6 Saved pages

7 Where your data lives

Where you can run ArchiveBox

ArchiveBox has native distributions for both Linux and MacOS. You can also run it as a Docker container on any device running Docker, including Windows. Since I have an old Mac mini converted to a Linux-based homelab Docker server, that’s where I set mine up.

If you’re not familiar with Docker and how to install it, or how to install Linux, or how to convert an old Mac to Linux, ZDNET’s Jack Wallen has you covered. Click the links in the previous sentence to come up to speed.

Docker is a container service. Basically, it’s like a virtual machine (VM), but without the machine. When you set up a VM, you’re configuring an entire computer emulator and an entire operating system install. So if you’re running a bunch of VMs, you have a lot of overhead (and potentially OS licenses) to deal with.

A container service like Docker just adds the application-specific layer on top of any other operating system. You can run the same Docker container on a Linux box, a Mac box, or a Windows PC, and it will generally be happy.

As much as I use VMs for certain types of projects, Docker is the perfect environment for something like ArchiveBox.

Installing ArchiveBox

The first thing I did was connect to my homelab server, and create a directory for the ArchiveBox data. I want the data to live outside the Docker container so it can be properly backed up as part of the machine’s file system.

mkdir -p /opt/archivebox/data

That command creates a folder called archivebox in the directory called /opt, and then creates a data folder inside that.

Next, it’s time to set up the ArchiveBox container. I manage Docker both by the command line and by using a container management tool called Portainer. I had ChatGPT give me the instructions for setting up the ArchiveBox container.

Also: How to install Ubuntu Linux (It’s easy!)

Here’s what I asked ChatGPT:

“I want to install ArchiveBox on my Docker system in Portainer. How can I set it up so the archive data is accessible outside the container, but also to the ArchiveBox app?”

It gave me guidelines.