Show HN: Wallabag, a self-hostable application for saving web pages | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Wallabag, a self-hostable application for saving web pages

wallabag.org

135 pointstcit43 comments

Hi there,

As written in the title, wallabag is a self-hosted read-it-later web application (like Pocket or Instapaper, but open-source) that saves content from webpages. You can organize content and sync it on different devices. We were kindly invited (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904805) by HN to do a Show HN, and hope you'll be interested in our project.

For the last few months, we've been working on a whole new version of our application (v2), and it sound very promising. We've just launched a new alpha version for you to test on your server : https://www.wallabag.org/blog/2016/01/22/wallabag-alpha2-v2. You can also have a preview at http://v2.wallabag.org/

If you're not willing to play adventurous, you can still give a try to old version 1.9.1 or choose our hosting service at https://framabag.org/

Cool, that's a nice thing to have self-hosted!

Is there a page explaining the main differences between 1.x and 2.x? (since "whole new version" suggests there is more behind it than just more features)

The main differences between the two versions is that v2.x uses Symfony as framework and (finally) provides an API for applications to connect properly to it.

And it's rewritten from scratch.

After registering, I receive an email: - from webmaster@example.org - named 'webmaster' - subject 'Welcome OJFord' - signed off 'Regards, The Team'

That is, it does not at all identify where it came from. The example.org sender is particularly odd, I don't know why you're doing that?

Registering where?

I checked configuration on v2.wallabag.org and our email is no-reply@wallabag.org. Where did you register yourself?

Registering at http://v2.wallabag.org/login, I just got exactly the same symptoms. See:

https://gist.github.com/cgb/04a7291f2377f818b663

I just tried a fix. Can you re-try please?

Sorry for the formatting of original post, clearly didn't check that.

Seems fixed now, though the name appears as "wallabag¬" - not sure if the last character is deliberate? (Hint: even if it is, it looks like it isn't, which might not be what you want!)

it was a quick fix, the real fix has just been merged https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/pull/1625 and will be published with next release. Thanks for reporting.

Pretty nasty that it even has that default value IMO.

Better to error if not set, let the dev explicitly put in some dummy values that's ever desired - that's why I said above "not sure why you're doing this", I assumed it was a setting of yours, not a '[neglect-to-]setting'!

Thank you for wallabag! I have been using it for quite a while and it's really quite nice.

I look forward to trying the new version. Does it handle HN posts now? The last time I tried to bag an HN post with the old version it failed :)

Not yet (well, the HN html code is really dirty, so that explains why it fails to grab content). We'll try fixing this.

Hi, and thank you for Wallabag! I've been happily using the self-hosted version for quite a while now. At some point I forked[1] the Android app but development stalled when I needed an API to be able to improve the app further. So this v2 is great news!

Just an FYI: in the blog post you mention that the login for the preview of v2 is wallabag/wallabag, however I get 'bad credentials' when trying that.

This new Material Design version looks awesome! Eagerly looking forward to v2 becoming stable so I can upgrade.

[1]: https://github.com/monkeyinmysoup/wallabag-android

someone changed the credentials, you can create your free account on v2.wallabag.org

wow nice your fork! Did you see that we released a new android version few months ago?

Thanks! I didn't know that, but I'll check it out. Thanks!

I would love that the site / domain specific xpath recipes were available as a separate repository, with all the usual community / ugc shebang.

I have been using wallabag recipes for a while, saving an otherwise expensive diffbot subscription.

specific xpath are available here https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config

Btw, sovereign[1] project has wallabag included in the package.

1) https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

This looks really cool, I'd love to see this on Sandstorm at some point. (I use TTRSS as a feed reader there, and tend to just star stuff to come back to, though this would be a better place for storing the stuff I want to read later.)

Hello ocdtrekkie, We don't have time to develop a sandstorm application. If you want to help us with this app, you're welcome ;-) I open a new issue to not forget your idea. Already here in fact https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/issues/1160

Heh, awesome to see people have already been talking about it!

Wallabag on Sandstorm is an interest of mine as well!

I did look at it a little bit a few months ago, and decided it wasn't a weekend project for me. It took me a little bit to rediscover why, but I think something like the current doc on [Network Access][] is what discouraged me: "By default, Sandstorm runs each app instance with no network access ... Supported protocol: SMTP (email), Other protocols: Work in progress."

[Network Access]: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/#network-acce...

Yeah, there's kinda a hacky interim method for apps to reach out to arbitrary HTTP. They're almost ready to release the more secure/better designed method.

Have you considered adding an option for saving/archiving the pages without cleaning them? Maybe utilize WARC somehow.

Not the same thing, but kind of relevant and interesting, gwern article on the dangers of link rot and archiving URLs: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs

Just tried the V2 demo, and it looks great, with both themes. I used V1 a year or so ago, and this is definitely a step up.

However, since Firefox added reader view, I find I don't use services like this any longer. I was a very longtime Instapaper user and then also used Readability.com, but now I just bookmark pages I like (and/or save them to Android Firefox's reading list).

I understand. It depends on your organization. Firefox reader view (who works very well) is not a read it later. It's a cleaner tool ;-)

So, how does work with DMCA issues? (Or am I missing something?)

In regards to self-hosting, there shouldn't be any copyright infringement as long as you are not re-serving the contents. Even then, there are exceptions, e.g. archive.org and Google Cache.

The biggest likely legal concern is possible accidental server DDOS, but as long as it respects robots.txt and it paces itself, that shouldn't happen.

Nice work! I'd like to see someone create an automatically reformat & send to Kindle app.

Check out tinderizer:

http://tinderizer.com

I like it, but the install have quite a lot of dependencies which was kind of annoying.

OK I think I'll go download that framabag.org thing instead, that sounds cool

Warc support would rule

Are there any plans to support video offline sync?

Ideas, but no real solutions.

stable version demo http://demo.wallabag.org/ is 404

Yes, sorry for that. Don't hesitate to create an account on Framabag.org (it's free!) to test stable version.

This website is now redirected to v2 demo

the demo page works for me, but the login/pw don't

nice!

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