Karakeep: self-hosted bookmarks with full-text search

Karakeep is a self-hostable app for saving bookmarks, notes and images, with search and automatic tagging features described by its maintainers. The main tradeoff is control over storage in exchange for operating and backing up the service yourself.

What Karakeep stores

Karakeep is an open-source bookmark and content archiving application that you can run yourself. It is designed to save links and make them easier to organize and retrieve later. A self-hosted archive gives you more control over where data is stored, but you also take responsibility for updates, backups, access and the machine running it.

Choose a supported deployment

Before installing, read the current project documentation and identify the supported deployment path. Choose a host with enough storage for saved pages and media, then set a strong administrator credential. Do not expose an unfinished instance directly to the public internet. If remote access is needed, use a secure reverse proxy or private network and keep the software updated.

Test capture and search

Create a small test collection first. Save a few representative links, add descriptive tags or lists, and search for them by title and content. Check what the application captures when a page changes or disappears. A saved copy is not guaranteed to preserve every dynamic page, login-only resource, or embedded asset.

Back up and restore the archive

Back up the database and any associated files together, and test restoring them into a separate instance. A backup is useful only if it can be restored. Decide how you will handle updates and monitor disk space before importing a large browser collection.

Keep provenance with saved links

Use Karakeep for personal organization, not as a substitute for a durable source citation or a rights-cleared publishing archive. Keep original URLs and dates, and verify important information at its publisher. Features, environment variables and deployment requirements can change; follow the project’s official docs for the version you run.

Official reference

Consult the official documentation for current instructions and applicable terms.