Note: this article is edited and published at Vultr Docs

ArchiveBox is a powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view sites you want to preserve offline. This guide explains how to self-host ArchiveBox on a Vultr One-Click Docker application, and publish it with a Caddy reverse proxy.

Prerequisites

• A Vultr One-Click Docker application running Ubuntu 18.04
• Caddy

This guide assumes that only ArchiveBox is hosted on the server, but you can easily extend the configuration of Caddy for more applications.

1. Set up ArchiveBox

Using docker-compose is the recommended way to set up ArchiveBox. And ArchiveBox provides an official docker-compose.yml which bundles all dependencies that we can use to set up our server.

1. After One-Click Docker deploys, log in as root via SSH.

2. Switch to the docker user

su - docker

3. Create a new empty directory, and download the official docker-compose.yml file. Note this folder will also be the place to store data of ArchiveBox.

mkdir ~/archivebox && cd ~/archivebox
curl -O 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/master/docker-compose.yml'

4. (Optional) You can set a restart policy of the archivebox service in the downloaded docker-compose.yml, so that ArchiveBox can start automatically on different situations. For example, set it to always.

archivebox:
    image: ${DOCKER_IMAGE:-archivebox/archivebox:latest}
        command: server --quick-init 0.0.0.0:8000
    ports:
        - 8000:8000
    restart: always
    environment:
        - ALLOWED_HOSTS=*
        - MEDIA_MAX_SIZE=750m
    volumes:
        - ./data:/data.

5. Run the initial setup and create an admin user. You will use this admin user to create bookmarks in ArchiveBox.

docker-compose run archivebox init --setup

6. Start the server at localhost:8000

docker-compose up -d

7. Switch back to the root user by pressing Ctrl+D

2. Set up a server firewall

A firewall prevents access to our server via un-allowed ports. For ArchiveBox, we only need to expose port 80 (for HTTP) and 443 (for HTTPS). You can also enable the SSH port which is helpful for a lot of situations, but it’s optional. In this guide, we will use the Uncomplicated Firewall ufw that is a front-end for iptables and easier to manage and use.

1. Install ufw

sudo apt-get install ufw

2. Enable the HTTP and HTTPS ports

sudo ufw allow 80
sudo ufw allow 443

3. (Optional) Enabled the SSH port. It’s recommended that you set the port to another port that is not 22, and make sure you update /etc/ssh/sshd_config to match the new port

sudo ufw allow 22

4. Start ufw

sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw status # Should show "Status: active"

3. Set up a reverse proxy with Caddy

Now that we have ArchiveBox running at localhost:8000, we want to publish it as a public-trusted site over HTTPS. We use Caddy which will handle reverse proxy and SSL termination with very little configuration.

1. Set your domain’s A record (e.g. archivebox.example.com) point to your Vultr server in your DNS provider. Verify correct records with an authoritative lookup

curl "https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query?name=archivebox.example.com&type=A" -H "accept: application/dns-json"

2. Install Caddy. There are many ways and you can even extend the docker-compose.yml of ArchiveBox. Here we will use the standard Caddy package.

sudo apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key' | sudo apt-key add -
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install caddy

2. Update Caddy’s configuration /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

archivebox.example.com

reverse_proxy localhost:8000

3. Run caddy reload to reload the configuration gracefully (without downtime)

4. Verify it works by visiting archivebox.example.com

Conclusion

At this point, you will have a self-hosted ArchiveBox application that you can bookmark websites from everywhere!