Kleingebäck - kleinanzeigen.de Backup

Die deutsche Version des READMEs findet Ihr hier.

This tool can be used to backup ads on the german ad page https://kleinanzeigen.de

It downloads all (or only the specified ones) ads of one user into a directory, each ad into its own subdirectory. The backup will contain a textfile Adlisting.txt which contains the ad contents as the title, body, price etc. All images will be downloaded as well.

Screenshots

This is the index of my kleinanzeigen.de Account:

Here I download my ads on the commandline:

And this is the backup directory after download:

Here's a directory for one ad:

The same thing under windows:

Downloading ads:

Backup directory after download:

And one ad listing directory:

Installation

The tool doesn't need authentication and doesn't have any dependencies. Just download the binary for your platform from the releases page and you're good to go.

Installation using a pre-compiled binary

Go to the latest release page and look for your OS and platform. There are two options to install the binary:

1. Directly download the binary for your platform, e.g. kleingebaeck-linux-amd64-0.0.5, rename it to kleingebaeck (or whatever you like more!) and put it into your bin dir (e.g. $HOME/bin or as root to /usr/local/bin).

Be sure to verify the signature of the binary file. For this also download the matching kleingebaeck-linux-amd64-0.0.5.sha256 file and:

cat kleingebaeck-linux-amd64-0.0.5.sha25 && sha256sum kleingebaeck-linux-amd64-0.0.5

You should see the same SHA256 hash.

2. You may also download a binary tarball for your platform, e.g. kleingebaeck-linux-amd64-0.0.5.tar.gz, unpack and install it. GNU Make is required for this:

tar xvfz kleingebaeck-linux-amd64-0.0.5.tar.gz
cd kleingebaeck-linux-amd64-0.0.5
sudo make install

Installation from source

You will need the Golang toolchain in order to build from source. GNU Make will also help but is not strictly neccessary.

If you want to compile the tool yourself, use git clone to clone the repository. Then execute go mod tidy to install all dependencies. Then just enter go build or - if you have GNU Make installed - make.

To install after building either copy the binary or execute sudo make install.

Using the docker image

A pre-built docker image is available, which you can use to test the app without installing it. To download:

docker pull ghcr.io/tlinden/kleingebaeck:latest

To execute kleingebaeck inside the image and download ads to a local directory, do something like this:

mkdir myads
docker run -u `id -u $USER` -v ./myads:/backup ghcr.io/tlinden/kleingebaeck:latest -u XXX -v
ls -l myads/ein-buch-mit-leeren-seiten
total 792
drwxr-xr-x 2 scip root   4096 Jan 23 12:58 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 scip scip   4096 Jan 23 12:58 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 scip root 131650 Jan 23 12:58 1.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 scip root  81832 Jan 23 12:58 2.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 scip root 134050 Jan 23 12:58 3.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 scip root   1166 Jan 23 12:58 Adlisting.txt

We map the local user to the one inside the image so the permission will match. You'll need to create the directory first before executing docker run. And the local directory myads will be mapped to /backup inside the container.

The options -u XXX -v are kleingebaeck options, replace XXX with your actual kleinanzeigen.de user id.

A list of available images is here

Commandline options:

Usage: kleingebaeck [-dvVhmoc] [<ad-listing-url>,...]
Options:
-u --user    <uid>      Backup ads from user with uid <uid>.
-d --debug              Enable debug output.
-v --verbose            Enable verbose output.
-o --outdir  <dir>      Set output dir (default: current directory)
-l --limit   <num>      Limit the ads to download to <num>, default: load all.
-c --config  <file>     Use config file <file> (default: ~/.kleingebaeck).
   --ignoreerrors       Ignore HTTP errors, may lead to incomplete ad backup.
-m --manual             Show manual.
-h --help               Show usage.
-V --version            Show program version.

If one  or more <ad-listing-url>'s  are specified, only  backup those,
otherwise backup all ads of the given user.

Configfile

You can create a config file to save typing. By default ~/.kleingebaeck is being used but you can specify one with -c as well.

Format is simple:

user = 1010101
loglevel = verbose
outdir = "test"

Environment Variables

Kleingebaeck can also be configured using environment variables. Just prefix the config variables with KLEINGEBAECK_ and put them to upper case. Eg:

% KLEINGEBAECK_OUTDIR=/backup kleingebaeck -v

Usage

To setup the tool, you need to lookup your userid on kleinanzeigen.de. Go to your ad overview page while NOT being logged in:

https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-bestandsliste.html?userId=XXXXXX

The XXXXX part is your userid.

Put it into the configfile as outlined above. Also specify an output directory. Then just execute kleingebaeck.

Inside the output directory you'll find a new subdirectory for each ad. Every directory contains a file Adlisting.txt, which will look somewhat like this:

Title: A book I sell
Price: 99 € VB
Id: 1919191919
Category: Sachbücher
Condition: Sehr Gut
Created: 10.12.2023

This is the description text.

Pay with paypal.

You can change the formatting using the template config variable. The supplied sample config contains the default template.

All images will be stored in the same directory.

Tool Behavior

There are a bunch of things you might want to know about the behavior of the kleingebäck tool:

• all HTML pages and IMAGEs are always being downloaded
• we use a (customizable) user agent
• we respect HTTP cookies
• in the case of an error, the tool does 3 retries, the time it waits between tries is longer for each retry
• image download is parallized using small time differences to look more natural
• same images are not being overwritten on subsequent download

The latter needs to be elaborated a bit more:

If you publish an ad on kleinanzeigen.de and post images, those images will be reduced in size by the site (by compressing and down sizing them). This reduced images will be downloaded by kleingebäck. However, you may still own the original images and may want to put them into that backup directory so that you have all things for one ad together.

You can easily do that, because kleingebäck won't overwrite those original images. It uses something called a distance hash using goimagehash. This algorithmus checks the similarity of images. If an image has been resized it is still very similar to the original one. We accept a maximum of a distance of 5, everything above leads to overwrite.

This works with resizes, cropped and otherwise manipulated images as long as the image still shows the original contents good enough.

Also note, that this is NOT a caching mechanism: the images will be downloaded anyway during each run. We also can't look at the file names because kleinanzeigen.de renames all images to numbers. And those might even change if the user re-arranges the images.

You can override this behavior using the --force option. Another option, --ignoreerrors, can be used to ignore all kinds of image errors.

Documentation

You can read the documentation online or locally once you have installed kleingebaeck with: kleingebaeck --manual.

Kleingebäck?

The name is derived from "kleinanzeigen backup": "klein" (german for small) and "back". In german "bäck" is spelled the same as the english "back" so "kleinbäck" was short enough, but it's not a valid german word. "Kleingebäck" however is: it means "Cookies" in english :)

Getting help

Although I'm happy to hear from kleingebaeck users in private email, that's the best way for me to forget to do something.

In order to report a bug, unexpected behavior, feature requests or to submit a patch, please open an issue on github: https://github.com/TLINDEN/kleingebaeck/issues.

Please repeat the failing command with debugging enabled -d and include the output in the issue.

Related projects

I could not find any projects specifically designed to backup kleinanzeigen.de ads, however there's a bot project which is also able to download ads: kleinanzeigen-bot. However, be aware that kleinanzeigen.de is actively fighting bots! Look at this issue. The problem with these kind of bots is, that they login into your account using your credentials. If the company is able to detect bot activity they can associate it easily with your account and lock you out. So be careful.

kleingebäck doesn't need to login, it just accesses public available web pages. Kleinanzeigen.de could hardly do anything against it, once because it is legal. There's no difference between a browser and a commandline client. Both run on the clientside and it is not kleinanzeigen.de's decision which software one uses to access their pages. And second: because you can use it to download any ads, not just yours. So it is not really clear if the activity is associated in any way with the ad owner. In addition to that comes the fact that kleingebäck is just a backup tool. It is not intendet to be used on a daily basis. You cannot use it to view regular ads or maintain your own ads. You'll need to use the mobile app or the browser page with a login. So, in my point of view, the risk is very minimal.

There is another Tool available named kleinanzeigen-enhanced. It is a complete Ad management system targeting primarily commercial users. You have to pay a monthly fee, perhaps there's also a free version available, but I haven't checked. The tool is implemented as a Chrome browser extension, which explains why it was possible to implement it without an API. It seems to be a nice solution for power users by the looks of it. And it includes backups.

Copyright and License

Licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE version 3.

Author

T.v.Dein