What is kage?
kage (Shadow) uses headless Chrome to render each page, captures the fully-rendered DOM, removes all JavaScript, and localises CSS, images, fonts, and other static assets. The result is a browseable offline copy of the site that opens cleanly without network access and without executing untrusted scripts.
Read the full overview
The project hit 689 points on Hacker News in July 2026 - higher than most AI tools launched that week - demonstrating that developers have a persistent, underserved need for reliable offline web archiving. The tool supports resume on interrupted crawls, differential updates, ZIM format export (compatible with Kiwix readers), and packaging as a standalone desktop app.
Key capabilities
- Headless Chrome rendering - waits for JavaScript to execute before capturing, so SPA content is included.
- JavaScript strip - removes all scripts from captured HTML, producing a static, safe offline copy.
- Resumable crawl - progress is saved so you can interrupt and continue large sites without starting over.
- Differential update - only re-crawls pages that changed since the last run.
- ZIM export - packages the archive in ZIM format for use with Kiwix readers.
- Desktop app packaging - wraps the cloned site in a standalone app that opens in its own window.
- Documentation archiving - offline copy of vendor docs, wikis, or internal knowledge bases.
- Air-gapped environments - bring web resources into isolated networks without internet access.
- Research preservation - snapshot pages or sites before they go offline or change.
- Security review - examine site structure and assets without executing scripts.
kage occupies the gap between wget/httrack (which produce broken offline copies of modern JS-rendered sites) and archive.org (which you don't control). It is primarily a developer and sysadmin tool for archiving documentation, intranet resources, or any site you need in air-gapped or low-connectivity environments. Not suitable for large dynamic sites with authentication-gated content.
wget has existed for decades but produces unusable archives of JavaScript-rendered sites. kage solves this with a headless-browser pipeline and clean JavaScript stripping. The 689-point Hacker News reception confirmed what developers already knew: offline archiving is a recurring need without a good modern answer. For sysadmins managing air-gapped deployments or teams with unreliable connectivity, kage fills a real gap in the tooling landscape.
Technical details
- Access
- Self-hosted
- Source model
- Open source
- Founded
- 2024
- Pricing model
- Open source
- API
- Not specified
- Published release
- Stable — latest community release v0.3.12 ↗ (checked )
- Website
- kage.tamnd.com ↗
Official resources
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