pastpath

Overview

pastpath is a local search engine for your browser history. It is primarily addressing 3 things:

• Extending searchable local history beyond 90 days
• Searching in browser history across multiple browsers
• Focus on finding the URL for that repo, docs site or blog that you can only remember small part of

pastpath works by collecting browser history from browsers and exposing it through an API and simple frontend. It can be used as a bookmarked page or as the default page on new tabs (through browser extensions)

Features

• Multi-Browser Support: Collects history from Chrome and Firefox (but can be extended to work with Safari, and Edge).
• Simple Search Interface: A simple interface for easy navigation and retrieval of your browsing history, to find that page you are looking for...
• Privacy First: Designed to work locally on your machine, ensuring that your data stays private.
• Cross-Platform Compatibility: It is cross compilable for any OS and architecuture that Go supports

Getting Started

How it works

For pastpath to work you need 3 steps (which are described in detail below):

• Get a binary (for now you build it) and put it in an appropriate location
• Define a config file with your browser information
• Make the binary run using your favorite service manager (systemd, launchd etc.)

Then go to the web page and search your history at http://localhost:10000 (or whatever port you configured).

Build

Clone the repository and build the binary:

git clone https://github.com/janbrunrasmussen/pastpath.git
cd pastpath
go build -o pastpath -ldflags "-X main.BuildVersion=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)"
cp pastpath APPROPRIATE-LOCATION e.g. /usr/local/pastpath

Configure

Add a json configuration file like this one:

{
    "ServerPort": 10000,
    "TmpDir": ".tmp",    
    "InstanceID": "YOUR DEVICE",
    "HistoryProcessingInterval": 600,
    "LocalDBPath": "pastpath.db",
    "Search": {
        "ReplaceHTTPWithHTTPS": true
    },
    "Browsers": [
        {
            "Name": "chrome",
            "Type": "Chrome",
            "HistoryDBPath": "PATH TO HISTORY DB"
        },
        {
            "Name": "firefox",
            "Type": "Firefox",
            "HistoryDBPath": "PATH TO HISTORY DB"
        }
    ]
}

pastpath looks for config.json in the same directory, but any path can be given with -c / --config argument.

Only Browsers section is required, the other settings have sane default values. Path to history databases for your OS and browser is easy to find on the web, though some general guidance:

• Chrome on macOS is likely: /Users/YOUR USER/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History
• Firefox on macOS is likely: Users/YOUR USER/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/YOUR PROFILE/places.sqlite

Running the app

pastpath can be started by simply executing the binary ./pastpath optionally with the config argument -c / --config [config path]. For it to make sense pastpath should be running continuously. In deployment/macos is an example of how to wrap it in launchd, with install scripts in the Makefile. Similar setup can be done with systemd, Service Control Manager or whatever service manager your OS supports.

Note on search

The search used is a basic SQL like based approach, with each space-separated term appended as it's own like. This has proven to provide fast and reliable results, even if it does not provide a fuzzy search option. Experiments with fzf did not show great potential.

OpenSearch (experimental)

Firefox (and maybe other browers, not Chrome) supports searching in omnibox (address bar) through custom OpenSearch compatible search engine. pastpath has experimental support for using this feature in Firefox, such that you can search history in your omnibox. These steps roughly outlines how to enable this:

1. Check opensearch.xml is configured with correct port
2. Go localhost:10000, add pastpathv as search engine in top right corner search bar (it is a bit tricky to find the button)
3. Set pastpath to default search engine in settings
4. Now you can get suggestions. It shows up as "title (url)". On enter it redirects to url. If url is not there, it redirect to google search.

Experience is not as good and rich as pastpath UI.

Roadmap

Items on top of the TODO list:

• Bring your own cloud type backup of pastpath's database
• More OSes
• More browsers
• Integrate bookmarks
• Maybe cross device synchronisation, to allow you to search history from another laptop.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! If you have an idea for improvement or have found a bug, feel free to fork the repo, create a feature branch, and submit a pull request. Alternatively, open an issue.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.