🚀 WebClone

A blazingly fast, async-first website cloning engine that preserves everything.

Features • Quick Start • Usage • Docker • Contributing

🎯 The Why

Traditional website cloners are slow, blocking, and fragile. They download one resource at a time, freeze on JavaScript-heavy sites, and produce incomplete mirrors.

WebClone is different. Built from the ground up with modern Python async/await, it:

• ⚡ Clones 10-100x faster with concurrent downloads

• 🎭 Handles dynamic SPAs using Selenium for JavaScript rendering

• 🎨 Delivers beautiful CLI experience with real-time progress and colored output

• 🏗️ Follows Clean Architecture with type-safe, production-grade code

• 🐳 Ships production-ready with Docker, full test coverage, and CI/CD

Whether you're archiving websites, conducting competitive research, or building training datasets, WebClone is the definitive solution.

✨ Features

🚀 Blazingly Fast Async Engine

• Concurrent downloads with configurable workers (5-50 parallel connections)

• Intelligent queue management with depth-first and breadth-first strategies

• Automatic retry logic with exponential backoff

🎭 Dynamic Page Rendering

• Full Selenium integration for JavaScript-heavy sites

• Automated sidebar navigation for SPAs (Phoenix LiveView, React, Vue)

• PDF snapshot generation with Chrome DevTools Protocol

• Screenshot capture for visual archival

🔐 Advanced Authentication & Stealth Mode ⭐ NEW

• Bypass bot detection: Masks automation signatures (navigator.webdriver, etc.)

• Fix GCM/FCM errors: Disables Google Cloud Messaging registration

• Cookie-based auth: Save and reuse login sessions

• Handle "insecure browser" blocks: Automatic workarounds for Google, Facebook, etc.

• Rate limit detection: Smart throttling and backoff strategies

• Human behavior simulation: Mouse movements and natural scrolling

🎨 World-Class CLI Experience

• Beautiful terminal UI powered by Rich

• Real-time progress bars with per-resource status

• Colored, formatted output with tables and panels

• JSON logs for production monitoring

🏗️ Production-Grade Architecture

• Type-safe: 100% type hints with Mypy validation

• Data validation: Pydantic V2 models with strict schemas

• Async-first: Built on aiohttp and asyncio

• Modular design: Clean Architecture with dependency injection

• Comprehensive logging: Structured JSON logs with contextual data

📦 Modern Tooling

• ⚡ uv: Lightning-fast dependency management

• 🔍 ruff: Ultra-fast linting and formatting

• 🧪 pytest: Comprehensive test suite with >90% coverage

• 🐳 Docker: Multi-stage builds with distroless base images

• 🔒 Security: Bandit audits and dependency scanning

🚀 Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+

• uv (recommended) or pip

Installation

# Using uv (recommended - blazingly fast!)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
uv pip install webclone

# Or using pip
pip install webclone

# Or from source
git clone https://github.com/ruslanmv/webclone.git
cd webclone
make install

Your First Clone

# Clone a website
webclone clone https://example.com

# With custom settings
webclone clone https://example.com \
  --output ./my_mirror \
  --workers 10 \
  --max-pages 100 \
  --recursive

That's it! Watch as WebClone downloads your site at lightning speed with beautiful progress bars.

🎨 Enterprise Desktop GUI (NEW!)

WebClone now includes a professional, native desktop interface built with modern Tkinter for superior performance:

# Install with GUI support
make install-gui

# Launch the Enterprise Desktop GUI
make gui

The GUI opens instantly as a native desktop application with:

• 🏠 Home Dashboard - Feature overview and quick start guide

• 🔐 Authentication Manager - Visual cookie-based auth workflow with browser integration

• 📥 Crawl Configurator - Point-and-click settings with real-time progress

• 📊 Results Analytics - Comprehensive stats, tables, and export options

Perfect for everyone! No command line required - professional desktop interface with instant startup, native performance, and seamless OS integration.

Advantages over web-based GUIs: ✅ Instant startup (no server to launch) ✅ Native desktop performance ✅ Better OS integration (file dialogs, notifications) ✅ No port conflicts ✅ Offline-friendly

🤖 MCP Server for AI Agents (NEW!)

WebClone is now an official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, making website cloning available to AI agents like Claude, CrewAI, and any MCP-compatible framework!

# Install MCP server
make install-mcp

# Use with Claude Desktop - add to config:
# ~/.config/claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "webclone": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["/path/to/webclone/webclone-mcp.py"]
    }
  }
}

AI agents can now:

• 🌐 clone_website - Download entire websites automatically

• 📥 download_file - Fetch specific files or URLs

• 🔐 save_authentication - Guide for saving login sessions

• 📋 list_saved_sessions - View all authentication cookies

• ℹ️ get_site_info - Analyze websites before downloading

Example with Claude:

You: Clone the FastAPI documentation website

Claude: I'll clone that for you.
[Uses WebClone MCP tool]

✅ Cloned 127 pages, 543 assets, 45.2 MB total!

Compatible with:

• ✅ Claude Desktop

• ✅ CrewAI

• ✅ LangChain

• ✅ Any MCP-compatible AI framework

📖 See: docs/MCP_GUIDE.md and MCP_QUICKSTART.md

📖 Usage

Interface Options

WebClone offers four ways to use it:

1. 🎨 Desktop GUI (Easiest - Enterprise Edition)

   make gui

   • Native desktop application

   • Instant startup, no browser required

   • Visual authentication manager

   • Real-time progress tracking

   • Perfect for all users!

2. 🤖 MCP Server (For AI Agents)

   make install-mcp

   • Claude Desktop integration

   • CrewAI compatible

   • LangChain ready

   • AI-powered automation

   • Perfect for AI workflows!

3. 💻 Command Line (Most Powerful)

   webclone clone https://example.com

   • Automation and scripting

   • CI/CD pipelines

   • Remote servers

   • Power users

4. 🐍 Python API (Most Flexible)

   from webclone.core import AsyncCrawler
   # ... your code

   • Custom integrations

   • Advanced workflows

   • Developers

Basic Commands

# Show help
webclone --help

# Clone a website
webclone clone <URL> [OPTIONS]

# Analyze a page without downloading
webclone info <URL>

Advanced Options

webclone clone https://example.com \
  --output ./mirror           # Output directory (default: website_mirror)
  --workers 10                # Concurrent workers (default: 5)
  --max-pages 100            # Maximum pages to crawl (0 = unlimited)
  --max-depth 3              # Maximum crawl depth (0 = unlimited)
  --delay 100                # Delay between requests in ms
  --no-assets                # Skip downloading CSS, JS, images
  --no-pdf                   # Skip PDF generation
  --all-domains              # Follow links to other domains
  --verbose                  # Detailed logging output
  --json-logs                # JSON-formatted logs for parsing

Real-World Examples

# Archive a news site (limit pages to avoid overload)
webclone clone https://news.example.com --max-pages 50 --workers 5

# Clone a documentation site recursively
webclone clone https://docs.example.com --recursive --max-depth 5

# Fast clone with maximum parallelism
webclone clone https://example.com --workers 20 --delay 0

# Production mode with JSON logs
webclone clone https://example.com --json-logs --output /var/data/mirror

🔐 Authentication & Stealth Examples

WebClone includes advanced features to handle authentication and bypass bot detection:

# Run interactive authentication examples
python examples/authenticated_crawl.py

# Example 1: Manual login and save cookies
# Opens browser, you log in, cookies are saved

# Example 2: Use saved cookies for automation
# Loads cookies, bypasses authentication

# Example 3: Test stealth mode effectiveness
# Visits bot detection sites to verify masking

Python API for Authentication:

from pathlib import Path
from webclone.services import SeleniumService
from webclone.models.config import SeleniumConfig

# Manual login and save session
config = SeleniumConfig(headless=False)
service = SeleniumService(config)
service.start_driver()
service.manual_login_session(
    "https://accounts.google.com",
    Path("./cookies/google.json")
)

# Later: Use saved cookies for automation
config = SeleniumConfig(headless=True)
service = SeleniumService(config)
service.start_driver()
service.navigate_to("https://google.com")
service.load_cookies(Path("./cookies/google.json"))
# Now authenticated!

Fixes Common Issues:

• ✅ "Couldn't sign you in - browser may not be secure"

• ✅ GCM/FCM registration errors

• ✅ Navigator.webdriver detection

• ✅ Rate limiting and CAPTCHA challenges

See Authentication Guide for detailed instructions.

🐳 Docker

Run WebClone in a containerized environment:

# Build the image
make docker-build

# Or manually
docker build -t webclone:latest .

# Run a clone
docker run --rm -v $(pwd)/output:/data webclone:latest \
  clone https://example.com --max-pages 10

# Interactive shell
docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd)/output:/data \
  --entrypoint /bin/bash webclone:latest

Docker Compose Example

version: '3.8'
services:
  webclone:
    image: webclone:latest
    volumes:
      - ./output:/data
    command: clone https://example.com --workers 10
    environment:
      - WEBCLONE_MAX_PAGES=100

🏗️ Architecture

WebClone follows Clean Architecture principles:

src/webclone/
├── cli.py              # Typer CLI interface
├── core/               # Core business logic
│   ├── crawler.py      # Async web crawler
│   └── downloader.py   # Asset downloader
├── models/             # Pydantic data models
│   ├── config.py       # Configuration schemas
│   └── metadata.py     # Result metadata
├── services/           # External service integrations
│   └── selenium_service.py
└── utils/              # Shared utilities
    ├── logger.py
    └── helpers.py

Key Design Decisions

1. Async-First: All I/O operations use asyncio for maximum concurrency

2. Type Safety: 100% type coverage with strict Mypy checks

3. Pydantic V2: Data validation at system boundaries

4. Dependency Injection: Services receive dependencies via constructors

5. Single Responsibility: Each module has one clear purpose

🧪 Development

Setup Development Environment

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/ruslanmv/webclone.git
cd webclone

# Install with dev dependencies
make dev

# Run tests
make test

# Run linter and type checker
make audit

# Format code
make format

Run Tests

# Full test suite with coverage
make test

# Fast tests without coverage
make test-fast

# Generate HTML coverage report
make coverage

Code Quality

# Lint with ruff
make lint

# Type check with mypy
make typecheck

# Format code
make format

# Run all quality checks
make audit

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Quick Contribution Workflow

1. Fork the repository

2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)

3. Make your changes

4. Run quality checks (make audit)

5. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')

6. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)

7. Open a Pull Request

📊 Benchmarks

Tested on a standard 4-core machine with 100 Mbps connection:

*wget cannot render JavaScript-based SPAs

📄 License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.

👤 Author

Ruslan Magana

• Website: ruslanmv.com

• GitHub: @ruslanmv

• Email: contact@ruslanmv.com

🌟 Star History

If you find WebClone useful, please consider giving it a star! ⭐

🙏 Acknowledgments

• Typer - Beautiful CLI framework

• Rich - Rich terminal formatting

• Pydantic - Data validation

• aiohttp - Async HTTP client

• uv - Lightning-fast package installer

Made with ❤️ by