Quick Start

These are rough instructions for a rough command-line tool. There is no GUI, yet.

Request and download an export from your Mastodon instance (e.g. archive-20230720182703-36f08a7ce74bbf59f141b496b2b7f457.tar.gz)
Download a release of pagefind and install it or use a precompiled binary
Download a release of Fossilizer - there is no installation, just a standalone command.
- Note: on macOS, you'll need to make an exception to run fossilizer in Security & Privacy settings
Make a working directory somewhere
Initialize the data directory:
```
fossilizer init
```

Ingest your Mastodon export and extract media attachments:

fossilizer import archive-20230720182703-36f08a7ce74bbf59f141b496b2b7f457.tar.gz

Build your static website in the build directory:
```
fossilizer build
```
Build pagefind assets for search:
```
pagefind --keep-index-url --site build
```
Serve the build directory up with a local web server - the --open option will attempt to open a browser:
```
fossilzer serve --open
```
Enjoy a static web site of your Mastodon toots.

Tips

Try fossilizer by itself for a list of subcommands, try --help as an option to get more details on any command.
Try fossilizer upgrade to upgrade the SQLite database and other assets when you download a new version. This is not (yet) automatic.
data/config.toml can be used to set many as-yet undocumented configuration options.
data/data.sqlite3 is a a persistent SQLite database that accumulates all imported data.
data/media is where media attachments are unpacked.
You can repeatedly import data and import from multiple Mastodon instances. Everything will be merged.
Try fossilizer init --customize, which unpacks the following for customization:
- a data/web directory with static web assets that will be copied into the build directory
- a data/templates directory with Tera templates used to produce the HTML output
- Note: this will not overwrite the database for an existing data directory, though it will overwrite any existing templates or web directories.