cohost-dl

Downloads posts onto your computer from cohost.org, which is shutting down.

• Post pages are downloaded exactly as they appear on Cohost, including shared posts, comments, and with your display settings (silenced tags, etc.)
• Downloads all of your own posts and all of your liked posts
• If you have a data portability archive: also downloads all posts you’ve commented on
• Legal: using this software does not somehow grant you a license to re-publish posts and comments from other people

See also: cohost-dl 2, which is easier to use and handles large amounts of data much better

Downloaded Data

Downloaded data will be placed in an out directory.

Detailed breakdown

• HTML files openable in a web browser
  • out/index.html: a simple overview page
  • out/~all/index.html: The Cohost Archive Global Feed
  • out/{handle}/index.html: page that shows all posts from {handle}
  • out/{handle}/post/12345-example.html: page that shows just that post, as it appeared on cohost.org
• Page resources
  • out/static/: files from cohost.org/static, such as CSS files
  • out/rc/attachment/: post images and audio files
  • out/rc/attachment-redirect/: honestly, no idea. ostensibly also post attachments
  • out/rc/avatar/, out/rc/default-avatar/: user avatars
  • out/rc/header/: user header images
  • out/rc/external/: external images not hosted on cohost.org but included in posts
  • out/{handle}/cdl-index.js: full-text search index
  • out/{handle}/cdl-chunk~{handle}~{n}.js: post data used in the list of all posts
  • out/~cohost-dl/: Javascript for all generated pages
• Data files
  • out/{your-handle}/liked.json: data for all posts you liked
  • out/{your-handle}/posts.json: data for all posts you made
  • out/{handle}/post/12345-example (without .html): original data for that post from cohost.org
  • out/~src/{site-version}/: unpacked source code for the Cohost frontend (used to create cohost-dl Javascript)
  • out/~headers.json: stores content type headers for some URLs that don’t have a good file extension

For file size, expect something around 1 GB for 1000 posts.

Files you can probably safely rehost online:

• out/{your-handle}/index.html
• out/{your-handle}/cdl-index.js
• out/{your-handle}/cdl-chunk~{...}.js
• out/~cohost-dl/
• files in out/rc/ required for the above page(s) to work

Why other files may not be safe to rehost online:

• out/{your-handle}/post/12345-example.html: is a very faithful Cohost page and hence contains all of your settings (sideblogs, muted tags, etc.)
  • The GENERIC_OBSERVER setting attempts to mitigate this, but it breaks a bunch of other things
• out/{not-your-handle}/: not yours

Usage

1. Copy CONFIG.example.ts to CONFIG.ts
2. edit CONFIG.ts appropriately
3. Install Deno
4. ./run.sh
   • if you’re using a system that doesn’t support Bash, such as Windows, you can just copy the deno run ... command from this file and run it directly.

It's safe to interrupt and re-start the script at any time. Things that have already been downloaded will not be downloaded again, and any changes in configuration will be taken into account upon restart.