reddit html archiver

pulls reddit data from the pushshift api and renders offline compatible html pages. uses the reddit markdown renderer.

install

requires python 3 on linux, OSX, or Windows.

warning: if $ python --version outputs a python 2 version on your system, then you need to replace all occurances of python with python3 in the commands below.

$ sudo apt-get install pip
$ pip install psaw -U
$ git clone https://github.com/chid/snudown
$ cd snudown
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ cd ..
$ git clone [this repo]
$ cd reddit-html-archiver
$ chmod u+x *.py

Windows users may need to run

> chcp 65001
> set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8

before running fetch_links.py or write_html.py to resolve encoding errors such as 'codec can't encode character'.

fetch reddit data

fetch data by subreddit and date range, writing to csv files in data:

$ python ./fetch_links.py politics 2017-1-1 2017-2-1

or you can filter links/posts to download less data:

$ python ./fetch_links.py --self_only --score "> 2000" politics 2015-1-1 2016-1-1

to show all available options and filters run:

$ python ./fetch_links.py -h

decrease your date range or adjust pushshift_rate_limit_per_minute in fetch_links.py if you are getting connection errors.

write web pages

write html files for all subreddits to r:

$ python ./write_html.py

you can add some output filtering to have less empty postssmaller archive size

$ python ./write_html.py --min-score 100 --min-comments 100 --hide-deleted-comments

to show all available filters run:

$ python ./write_html.py -h

your html archive has been written to r. once you are satisfied with your archive feel free to copy/move the contents of r to elsewhere and to delete the git repos you have created. everything in r is fully self contained.

to update an html archive, delete everything in r aside from r/static and re-run write_html.py to regenerate everything.

hosting the archived pages

copy the contents of the r directory to a web root or appropriately served git repo.

potential improvements

• fetch_links
  • num_comments filtering
  • thumbnails or thumbnail urls
  • media posts
  • score update
  • scores from reddit with praw
• real templating
• choose Bootswatch theme
• specify subreddits to output
• show link domain/post type
• user pages
  • add pagination, posts sorted by score, comments, date, sub
  • too many files in one directory
• view on reddit.com
• js powered search page, show no links by default
• js inline media embeds/expandos
• archive.org links

see also

• pushshift, r/pushshift
• psaw
• snudown
• redditsearch.io
• reddit post archiver
• reddit downloader

screenshots