indice

indice is a web archive server written in Rust — think of it as a reading room for web archives. Point it at a pile of local or remote WACZ files and it gives you:

• 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, instead of taking the archive on faith.
• In-browser replay of archived pages via ReplayWeb.page / wabac.js.
• A management workroom where authenticated users edit collection metadata and descriptions.

It ships as a single self-contained binary — no Solr, no Elasticsearch, no separate database server. That’s a deliberate design goal: indice is built for small, local, and private use (a person indexing a handful of their own WACZ files on a laptop, with nothing sent to a hosted service) and uses the same model to scale up toward institutional collections. It aims to fit both ends of that range, rather than assuming the infrastructure of a large web archive.

Replay is Webrecorder’s work

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.

Where to start

• New here? Install indice, then try it in a minute.
• Bringing archives in? Import from Browsertrix or Archive-It.
• Curating? Manage & curate in the workroom.
• Running a server? Deploy indice.
• Digging deeper? The command-line reference and how indice works.

Why “indice”?

An indice is a sign that points beyond itself, and the name gathers three senses of the same idea. Suzanne Briet argued that a wild antelope becomes a document once it is captured, catalogued, and set aside as evidence. She defined a document as “un indice concret ou symbolique, conservé ou enregistré” (a concrete or symbolic sign, preserved or recorded). Charles Sanders Peirce used index for the same family of sign: one bound to its object by a real, existential connection like smoke to fire, or a weathervane to the wind. Squint a little and a web capture is like that too: a trace connected to a moment of the live web. And, of course, indice builds a full-text index over the archives it serves, so the simplest meaning applies too.