What is kage?
kage (the name means shadow in Japanese) clones a website into a folder you can browse offline, with every script stripped out. It opens each page in a real headless Chrome, lets the page finish loading, and keeps the finished result before removing the JavaScript. The mirror is plain HTML files you can open from disk, with CSS, images and fonts saved locally.
The kage pack command collapses a mirror into one ZIM archive, a self-contained viewer binary or a double-click app. ZIM output also works with Kiwix readers, and kage serve previews a cloned folder over a local HTTP server. A crawl can be limited by page count or link depth.
kage is written in Go and licensed under MIT. Install it with go install, Homebrew on macOS, Scoop on Windows, or apt and dnf repositories on Linux. It needs Chrome or Chromium on the host, or you can use the container image, which bundles Chromium.
Key capabilities
- Script-free mirror A browsable offline copy with every script removed.
- Real browser rendering Pages are rendered in headless Chrome before capture.
- Packing ZIM archive, viewer binary or double-click app.
- Local preview Kage serve over a local HTTP server.
- Crawl limits Cap pages and link depth.
Where kage fits
- Offline mirrors Clones a website into a folder you can browse offline, with every script stripped out.
- Real browser rendering Opens each page in headless Chrome so JavaScript-built pages are captured as a person would see them.
- Scoped crawls Limits a crawl by page count, link depth or path prefix, for example the first 50 pages two links deep.
- Polite, resumable crawling A breadth-first crawl that saves its place on Ctrl-C and can be refreshed in place later.
- Packing Collapses a mirror into one ZIM archive (the format Kiwix uses), a viewer binary or a double-click app.
- Local preview Kage serve previews a cloned folder over a local HTTP server.
- Container option A container image bundles Chromium, so no local Chrome install is needed.
Install
go install github.com/tamnd/kage/cmd/kage@latestReviews of kage
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Alternatives to kage
AutomaAutoma is a Chrome and Firefox extension that automates browser work with a block editor and a recorder. It handles form filling, scraping to tables, scheduled runs and Google Sheets export, with AGPL source on GitHub.CCamoufoxCamoufox is an open source anti-detect browser built for web scraping and AI agents, intended for use with rotating, preferably residential, proxies.
Crawl4AICrawl4AI is an Apache-2.0 Python crawler built on Playwright that outputs Markdown, JSON, screenshots and PDFs for RAG and agents. Run it as a library, a Docker server with REST and MCP, or use the hosted Crawl4AI Cloud API.