Simple Stack Exchange Archiver

Archives any Stack Exchange user profile into a self-contained static website. One command, one directory, everything works offline.

What it does

1. Downloads all 5 profile tab pages (top, accounts, reputation, activity, subscriptions)
2. Detects and captures paginated content (questions, answers, activity)
3. Downloads every linked question page across all SE network sites
4. Runs a generated stitch script that rewrites navigation to local files, inlines pagination with JS switchers, localizes question/answer links, and removes dead external links
5. Cleans up temp files

The output is a directory you can serve with any static file server or open directly in a browser.

Requirements

• POSIX shell (sh)
• curl
• grep with -P (Perl regex) support
• Python 3 (for the stitch step)

Installation

git clone https://github.com/krisyotam/sse-archiver.git
cd sse-archiver
chmod +x se-archive

# optionally symlink into PATH
ln -s "$PWD/se-archive" ~/.local/bin/se-archive

Usage

se-archive <stackexchange_user_url>

The URL should be the network profile page on stackexchange.com:

# archive a math.SE user
se-archive https://stackexchange.com/users/3364210/cleo

# archive a stackoverflow user
se-archive https://stackexchange.com/users/12345/someone

# serve the result
cd ~/dev/cleo
python3 -m http.server 8000

Archives are saved to ~/dev/<username>/.

Supported sites

Works with any site in the Stack Exchange network:

• Stack Overflow
• Mathematics, MathOverflow
• Super User, Server Fault, Ask Ubuntu
• All *.stackexchange.com sites (Physics, TeX, CS Theory, etc.)

Question pages are prefixed by site: math-562694.html, so-16452383.html, mo-130500.html, physics-12345.html, etc.

Output structure

<username>/
  index.html          # top questions + top answers with JS pagination
  accounts.html       # network accounts
  reputation.html     # reputation history
  activity.html       # recent activity with JS pagination
  subscriptions.html  # filter subscriptions
  stitch.py           # generated stitcher, can be re-run
  questions/
    math-562694.html   # individual question pages
    so-16452383.html
    mo-130500.html
    ...

How it works

The script runs in 6 phases:

The stitch script processes each profile page in order: rewrite tabs, inline pagination, rewrite question links, kill external links. This ordering matters because inlined pagination content needs its links rewritten before external link removal runs.

Limitations

• Cloudflare or rate limiting may block some question page downloads. The script warns when a page is suspiciously small (<5KB). Re-running skips pages already downloaded.
• The "Hot Network Questions" sidebar links to unrelated questions that aren't downloaded.
• CSS and images still load from SE CDN servers, so styling requires an internet connection.
• Only pagination works client-side. Voting, commenting, and other interactive features are dead by design.

License

Public domain.