Wallabag — Self-Hosted Read-It-Later App

Introduction

Wallabag is a self-hosted, open-source read-it-later application and a privacy-respecting alternative to Pocket and Instapaper. It extracts and saves the content of web articles so you can read them later offline, on any device, without ads or tracking.

What Wallabag Does

• Saves web articles with full content extraction, stripping ads and navigation
• Organizes saved articles with tags, favorites, and archive status
• Provides full-text search across your entire reading library
• Supports annotations and highlights on saved article content
• Exports articles to EPUB, PDF, or plain text for e-reader devices

Architecture Overview

Wallabag is a Symfony PHP application backed by MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite. The content extraction engine parses HTML and applies site-specific rules to pull clean article text. A REST API powers the mobile apps and browser extensions. RabbitMQ or Redis can handle async import processing for large batches.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Deploy with Docker using the official image with volume mounts for data and images
• Requires a database backend (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite for small installs)
• Configure parameters.yml for database, mailer, and domain name settings
• Enable RabbitMQ or Redis workers for async article fetching on large imports
• Set up the browser extension or bookmarklet for one-click article saving

Key Features

• Content extraction powered by Graby with site-specific config for thousands of sites
• Multi-format export to EPUB, PDF, CSV, and JSON for portable reading
• Import from Pocket, Instapaper, Pinboard, and browser bookmarks
• REST API enables integration with automation tools like n8n or Zapier
• Multi-user support with per-user libraries, tags, and reading statistics

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Pocket — Mozilla-owned cloud service; Wallabag is self-hosted and ad-free
• Instapaper — cloud read-later with premium tier; Wallabag is free and open-source
• Omnivore — open-source but cloud-first; Wallabag is designed for self-hosting
• Linkding — bookmark manager; Wallabag extracts and stores full article content
• Shiori — simpler Go-based archiver; Wallabag offers richer tagging and export

FAQ

Q: Can I import my Pocket library? A: Yes. Export your Pocket data and import it directly through the Wallabag web UI. Thousands of articles can be imported in one batch.

Q: Does it work on e-readers? A: Wallabag can export articles as EPUB files. There are also dedicated apps for Kindle and Kobo that sync with your Wallabag instance.

Q: Is there a mobile app? A: Official apps exist for Android and iOS. They sync with your server and support offline reading of saved articles.

Q: How does content extraction work? A: Wallabag uses the Graby library with site-specific rules and CSS selectors to extract the main article content from any web page.

Sources

• https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag
• https://doc.wallabag.org/