Web UI Guide

Web UI Guide

Opening the UI

Run with npx (no installation required):

npx @nightteye/uncage

Or if installed globally:

uncage

Or from source in the cloned repo:

npm start

This launches the web interface at http://localhost:8787. Your default browser will open automatically.

Cloning a Site

1. Paste the full URL of the site you want to clone into the URL field (for example, https://example.com).
2. Optionally set a custom output folder name. It defaults to the site's hostname.
3. Click "Start Export".

An instance card will appear showing live progress. You can paste another URL and start a second export right away -- up to 3 run at the same time.

Instance Cards

Each export gets its own card in the grid. The card shows:

• Status pill -- Queued, Running, Done, or Failed.
• Live terminal -- A scrolling log of what the cloner is doing.
• Preview button -- Opens the cloned site in a new tab (appears when done).
• ZIP button -- Downloads the entire export as a .zip file.

Cards survive page refreshes. If you reload or switch tabs and come back, your instances will still be there.

Export Options

Click the "Advanced" toggle below the URL field to see these options:

Option	Default	What it does
Max pages	50	Maximum number of pages to crawl.
Timeout	30000 ms	How long to wait for each page to load.
Max link depth	Unlimited	0 means only the page you entered. 1 means that page plus pages it links to. And so on.
Headless	On	When off, you can watch the browser crawl in real time.
Respect robots.txt	On	Follows the site's crawling rules.
Priority pages only	Off	When on, only crawls pages with a sitemap priority of 0.5 or higher.
Safe mode	Off	Disables JavaScript. Faster but cannot render single-page apps.
Skip JS dependency scanning	Off	Skips the step that finds and downloads JavaScript module imports.
Keep analytics	Off	Preserves tracking scripts like Google Analytics.
Skip CSS purge	Off	Keeps all CSS classes. Turn this on if the export looks broken.

Output Files

Exports are saved to output/<folder-name>/. Each export contains:

• HTML files for every crawled page.
• An assets/ folder with CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts, and other resources.
• A package.json with a preview script for local testing.
• A README.md with basic instructions.

Tips

• If a site looks broken after exporting, try turning on "Skip CSS purge". The purger sometimes removes classes that are added dynamically by JavaScript.
• Use "Max link depth: 0" if you only want a single page, not the whole site.
• The "Safe mode" option is useful for simple static sites. It skips JavaScript rendering, which makes the export much faster.