SingleFile (Command Line Interface)

Introduction

SingleFile can be launched from the command line by running it into a (headless) browser. It runs through Node.js as a standalone script injected into the web page instead of being embedded into a WebExtension. To connect to the browser, it can use Puppeteer or Selenium WebDriver. Alternatively, it can also emulate a browser with JavaScript disabled by using jsdom.

Install

• Make sure Chrome or Firefox is installed and the executable can be found through the PATH environment variable. Otherwise you will need to set the --browser-executable-path option to help SingleFile locating it. As an alternative to Chrome and Firefox, you can use jsdom by setting the --back-end option to jsdom.

• Install Node.js

• Unzip the master archive somewhere on your disk in an empty folder and go into the SingleFile-master/cli directory.

  unzip master.zip .

  cd SingleFile-master

  cd cli

• As an alternative to decompressing the master archive, you can clone the repository if git is installed on your machine and go into the SingleFile/cli directory.

  git clone https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile.git

  cd SingleFile

  cd cli

• Install dependencies with npm (installed with Node.js).

  npm install

• Make single-file executable (Linux/Unix/BSD etc.).

  chmod +x single-file

• To use Firefox instead of Chrome, you must download the Selenium WebDriver component (i.e. geckodriver for Firefox). Make sure it can be found through the PATH environment variable or the cli folder. Otherwise you will need to set the --web-driver-executable-path option to help WebDriver locating the executable.

Run

• Syntax

  single-file <url> [output] [options ...]

• Display help

  single-file --help

• Examples

  • Dump the processed content of https://www.wikipedia.org into the console

  single-file https://www.wikipedia.org

  • Save https://www.wikipedia.org into wikipedia.html

  single-file https://www.wikipedia.org wikipedia.html

  • Save https://www.wikipedia.org into wikipedia.html with Firefox instead of Chrome

  single-file https://www.wikipedia.org wikipedia.html --back-end=webdriver-gecko

  • Save a list of URLs stored into list-urls.txt

  single-file --urls-file=list-urls.txt

  • Save https://www.wikipedia.org and crawl its internal links with the query parameters removed from the URL

  single-file https://www.wikipedia.org --crawl-links=true --crawl-inner-links-only=true --crawl-max-depth=1 --crawl-rewrite-rules="^(.*)\\?.*$ $1"

  • Save https://www.wikipedia.org and external links only

  single-file https://www.wikipedia.org --crawl-links=true --crawl-inner-links-only=false --crawl-external-links-max-depth=1 --crawl-rewrite-rules="^.*wikipedia.*$"

Troubleshooting

• If the error message UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: Browser is not downloaded. Run "npm install" or "yarn install" at ChromeLauncher.launch is displayed, it probably means that single-file was not able to find the executable of the browser. Using the option --browser-executable-path to pass to single-file the complete path of the executable fixes this issue.

• If saving a page takes an unusually long time, this may be due to a timeout error that was automatically recovered. Setting --browser-wait-until to a lower value (e.g. networkidle0 or load instead of networkidle2) fixes this issue.

Docker

• Build

  docker build -t singlefile .

• Run

  docker run singlefile "https://www.wikipedia.org"

• Run and pipe the result into a file

  docker run singlefile "https://www.wikipedia.org" > wikipedia.html

License

SingleFile is licensed under AGPL. Code derived from third-party projects is licensed under MIT. Please contact me at gildas.lormeau <at> gmail.com if you are interested in licensing the SingleFile code for a commercial service or product.