Friendica Archiver

A simple command line tool for archiving your Friendica profile via the Friendica API.

Installation

There are pre-compiled binaries for the tools for Linux, Mac, and Windows below. You can download those and use them. Simply download for your respective platform, unzip, and then run.

• Windows x64
• macOS x64
• Linux x64

Or you can run it directly from this directory using standard Dart commands:

git clone git@gitlab.com:mysocialportal/friendica-archiving-tools.git
cd friendica-archiving-tools
dart pub get
dart bin/friendica_archiver.dart

Usage

The tool only supports username and password credentials workflow. The arguments to run are:

Online help:

-a, --archive-folder (mandatory)    Specifies the local folder all data files pulled from the server will be stored
-u, --username (mandatory)          Username on your Friendica instance
-s, --server-name (mandatory)       The server name for your instance. (e.g. if the URL in your browser is "https://friendica.com/" then this would be "friendica.com
-r, --resume-page                   The page to restart the downloading process. Will try to read in existing posts and image archive data and start download from there. If set to 0 it resets from scratch.
                                    (defaults to "0")
-d, --delay                         Delay in milliseconds between requests to try not to stress the server (thousands of API calls can be made)
                                    (defaults to "5000")
-m, --max-post-requests             The maximum number of times to query for posts
                                    (defaults to "1000000000")
-p, --items-per-page                The requested number of items per page
                                    [1, 5, 10, 20 (default), 50, 100]
-i, --[no-]download-images          Whether to download images from posts when those images are stored on the server (not links to other sites) (defaults to true)
                                    (defaults to on)

Along with the mandatory arguments you will be required to provide a password. There will a prompt for the password which one can enter in. Alternatively one can store their password in a file and pass it in via stdin redirect.

The base archive folder needs to be created first and should be an empty folder if starting an archival from scratch.

Examples

Basic Usage

Minimum arguments to start processing the archive from scratch:

./friendica_archiver --username user1 --server-name myfriendicaserver.com --archive-folder ~/Downloads/FriendicaArchive

In this case the Password prompt will come up nad you type in your profile. There is a current bug with Dart that prevents me from disabling echo so your password will be displayed on the screen.

Minimum arguments to start processing the archive with password in file:

./friendica_archiver --username user1 --server-name myfriendicaserver.com --archive-folder ~/Downloads/FriendicaArchive < ~/friendica_password.txt

In this case if your password is 123456789 (and please change your password if that is your actual password), then the entirety of the text file would be:

123456789

Restarting Archival

As the archival unfolds it lists which pages it outputs status about which page it loaded last. It is therefore possible to restart archiving at a certain page:

./friendica_archiver --username user1 --server-name myfriendicaserver.com --archive-folder ~/Downloads/FriendicaArchive --resume-page 2 --max-post-requests 3 --items-per-page 5  < ~/friendica_password.txt