indice

indice is a web archive server written in Rust, which functions as a reading room for web archives. You can point it at a collection of local or remote WACZ files and it gives you full-text faceted search, crawl provenance, faithful in-browser replay, annotation support, and a management workroom, all from a single self-contained binary. Curator supplied descriptions are persisted on the file system as Markdown and JSON files that are revision control ready.

• 🌐 Website & tour: https://indice.page
• 📖 Documentation: https://indice.page/docs/

Nota bene: indice is alpha software and has been written extensively with the support of Claude Code. Like any piece of software it may contain bugs, and the developer's understanding of how it operates at a low level may be limited. See DESIGN.md for the overall design principles. Technical reviews of the code and design are always welcome!

The web archive replay is entirely Webrecorder's work. indice bundles and serves ReplayWeb.page and wabac.js — the browser-side engine that does all the actual replay — and adds a thin Rust layer for indexing, search, and serving. Webrecorder did the heavy lifting; please support them.

The readings room

• Full-text search with faceted, temporal browsing: hit-highlighted snippets, then narrow by collection, site, date, type, or language, with a timeline for navigating through time.
• Provenance up front: see how each crawl was made (software, operator, dates, seeds, page counts) and verify each WACZ's fixity.
• In-browser replay of the archived pages via Webrecorder's ReplayWeb.page / wabac.js.
• A management workroom where authenticated users add archives and edit collection metadata and descriptions. They can also annotate individual pages or regions of pages as Web Annotations Vocabulary
• Careful with archived code: replayed pages run their own JavaScript, so indice replays them on an origin of their own, where that script cannot act as the person reading. On a server, changes need a sign-in through your identity provider and a role you grant. The threat model says what indice defends and what it does not.

It ships as a single self-contained binary, so there is no Solr, no Elasticsearch, no separate database server. indice is built for small, local, and private use (a person indexing a handful of their own WACZ files on a laptop, nothing sent to a hosted service) and uses the same model to scale up towards multi-user institutional collections.

Install

Prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows are on the latest release. Or:

brew install edsu/indice/indice                                     # Homebrew (macOS / Linux)
cargo install --git https://github.com/edsu/indice --locked indice  # cargo

Docker, building from source, and the macOS Gatekeeper note are covered in the install docs.

Try it in a minute

First you need a WACZ. If you don't have one already, download apod.wacz, which is a crawl of one page from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. Learn more about the different ways of creating your own in the Making a WACZ section of the manual.

Index apod.wacz into a collection, and then start the server:

indice index --collection "APOD" apod.wacz   # build the search index from the sample
indice serve                                 # http://127.0.0.1:8080

Open http://127.0.0.1:8080 to full-text search the captured pages, narrow by the facets, and replay the archived site in your browser. Point indice index at your own .wacz files the same way (local paths or http(s):// URLs); indice serve also gives you an in-browser interface for adding and curating crawls.

Documentation

The full manual lives at https://indice.page/docs/:

• Install · Quick start · Searching
• Importing from Browsertrix and Archive-It
• Manage & curate · Deploy & run · Scale up
• Reference: Command line · Operator configuration · How indice works

Architecture and design rationale: DESIGN.md.

Credits

indice stands almost entirely on the shoulders of Webrecorder. Faithfully replaying an archived page in the browser is done by their ReplayWeb.page and wabac.js, both of which indice ships and serves unmodified. It also builds on the open WACZ format and the broader web-archiving community. If indice is useful to you, please support Webrecorder's work.

License

indice is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later), which is the same license as the ReplayWeb.page and wabac.js components it bundles. See LICENSE for the full text and NOTICE for third-party attributions and bundled-asset details.