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Troubleshooting

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Nick Sweeting edited this page Apr 12, 2022 · 15 revisions

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Troubleshooting

▶️ If you need help or have a question, you can open an issue or reach out on Twitter.

What are you having an issue with?:

Installing

Make sure you've followed the Manual Setup guide in the Install instructions first. Then check here for help depending on what component you need help with:

Python

On some Linux distributions the python3 package might not be recent enough. If this is the case for you, resort to installing a recent enough version manually.

add-apt-repository ppa:fkrull/deadsnakes && apt update && apt install python3.8  # python3.9 also works

If you still need help, the official Python docs are a good place to start.

Chromium/Google Chrome

For more info, see the Chromium Install page.

ArchiveBox depends on being able to access a chromium-browser/google-chrome executable. The executable used defaults to chromium-browser but can be manually specified with the environment variable CHROME_BINARY:

env CHROME_BINARY=/usr/local/bin/chromium-browser archivebox add ~/Downloads/bookmarks_export.html
  1. Test to make sure you have Chrome on your $PATH with:
which chromium-browser || which google-chrome

If no executable is displayed, follow the setup instructions to install and link one of them.

  1. If a path is displayed, the next step is to check that it's runnable:
chromium-browser --version || google-chrome --version

If no version is displayed, try the setup instructions again, or confirm that you have permission to access chrome.

  1. If a version is displayed and it's <59, upgrade it:
apt upgrade chromium-browser -y
# OR
brew cask upgrade chromium-browser
  1. If a version is displayed and it's >=59, make sure ArchiveBox is running the right one:
env CHROME_BINARY=/path/from/step/1/chromium-browser archivebox version   # replace the path with the one you got from step 1

Wget & Curl

If you're missing wget or curl, simply install them using apt or your package manager of choice. See the "Manual Setup" instructions for more details.

If wget times out or randomly fails to download some sites that you have confirmed are online, upgrade wget to the most recent version with brew upgrade wget or apt upgrade wget. There is a bug in versions <=1.19.1_1 that caused wget to fail for perfectly valid sites.

Archiving

No links parsed from export file

Please open an issue with a description of where you got the export, and preferrably your export file attached (you can redact the links). We'll fix the parser to support your format.

Lots of skipped sites

If you ran the archiver once, it wont re-download sites subsequent times, it will only download new links. If you haven't already run it, make sure you have a working internet connection and that the parsed URLs look correct. You can check the ArchiveBox stdout logs or the Web UI to see what links it's downloading.

If you're still having issues, try deleting or moving the ./archive folder (back it up first!) and running archivebox init again.

Lots of errors

Make sure you have all the dependencies installed and that you're able to visit the links from your browser normally. Open an issue with a description of the errors if you're still having problems.

Lots of broken links from the index

Not all sites can be effectively archived with each method, that's why it's best to use a combination of wget, PDFs, and screenshots. If it seems like more than 10-20% of sites in the archive are broken, open an issue with some of the URLs that failed to be archived and I'll investigate.

Removing unwanted links from the index

archivebox remove --help

Hosting the Archive

If you're having issues trying to host the archive via nginx, make sure you already have nginx running with SSL. If you don't, google around, there are plenty of tutorials to help get that set up. Open an issue if you have problem with a particular nginx config.

Other database or filesystem issues

See here for more info: