browse

This script is a wrapper around tabbed and vimb which manages persistence, cache, and initial URL. The simplest usage is to give the desired starting URL as the first argument and options for the browser following. More configuration is possible through environment variables and a configuration directory, described below.

In most configurations, the browse command will create a temporary directory in which the session's persistent files, cache, and downloads will be stored, and which will be erased on exit.

It is intended for this script to be POSIX-compliant, or at least run on many different shells. It has only been tested on Linux with dash as /bin/sh, so please report problems and other shells and operating systems with which it does or doesn't work.

Installation

Just copy browse to somewhere on your path. Create links to the executable to invoke configured behavior (see below).

Environment variables

Variable Name	Feature
$BROWSE_HOME	URL to browse to, if not given on the command line
$BROWSE_DIR	Working directory, rather than a temporary directory
$BROWSE_CFG	Configuration directory, instead of ~/.browse

Command line flags

-P prints the names of persisted files and exits.

-V prints the version and exits.

Configuration

Configuration goes in $BROWSE_CFG, or ~/.browse by default. Profiles are invoked by launching browse with the profile name as the program name. The easiest way to accomplish this is usually to create symbolic links. A profile's configuration file is named after the profile with .cfg appended. For example, a search profile's configuration would be $BROWSE_CFG/search.cfg. (The default profile, of course, would be called browse.) The configuration file uses a simple key = value format. Whitespace around the = will be ignored, but the key must not be preceded by whitespace.

The url key determines the initial URL for the session when not provided on the command line. For example, the search profile may contain the following:

search = https://duckduckgo.com

The other keys are names of files that vimb stores in its profile directory and copies into the working directory when launching a session. A complete list of files is obtained with browse -P. The value of the key may be all, to copy the file verbatim to the profile directory after quitting; or it may be a regular expression used to filter the file. For example, to save only cookies from GitHub, and all of the history, bookmarks, and queue, the configuration file would contain the following:

cookies = /github\.com/
history = all
bookmarks = all
queue = all

Or, to save just the cookies needed to stay logged into GMail:

cookies = /^\(mail\|accounts\|#HttpOnly_[^.]*\)\?\.\(google\|youtube\)\.com/

Any lines from the cookies file matching that pattern (using sed) will be stored in the cookies file of the profile directory after quitting. The persistence rules are not evaluated until quitting, so they may be modified while running a session of a profile, as long as the configuration file existed when the session was launched.

Change log

• v3:
  • fix -V flag semantics
  • change configuration format from save file to save directory
  • add changelog
• v2:
  • add -V flag
  • replace surf with vimb
• v1: add surf patch for command line cache

Planned features

• Specify base directory & temporary directory template
• Support other browsers (e.g., surf), if it can be done sensibly

Copyright © 2015-2016 Andrew Hills. See LICENSE for details.