The problem with cloud bookmark managers
Pocket, Raindrop.io, Instapaper — they're convenient, but every link you save teaches an ad network about your interests. More practically: if the service shuts down (Pocket was acquired, Instapaper was briefly EU-blocked), your archive goes with it. And none of them give you full-text search across the actual page content — only the title and tags you manually added.
Karakeep (formerly Hoarder) is the self-hosted answer: open-source under AGPL-3.0, 26 k+ GitHub stars, and deployable as three Docker containers on a 2 GB VPS in under ten minutes.
What Karakeep does that cloud managers don't
- Crawls and archives the full page content at save time — find articles by their body text, not just their title, even after the original page disappears.
- Headless Chrome screenshots every URL — visual archive of what the page looked like when you saved it.
- AI auto-tagging via local Ollama or OpenAI — drop a URL and get relevant tags generated automatically; no manual tagging required.
- Full-text search via Meilisearch — millisecond queries across all saved content, including PDF text and image OCR.
- PWA for mobile — add bookmarks from your phone's native share sheet directly to your self-hosted instance.
- REST API — push and pull bookmarks programmatically; connect n8n, browser extensions or custom pipelines.
Architecture: three containers on one VPS
Karakeep runs three Docker containers:
1. The Karakeep application (Node.js) — handles the web interface, REST API, and orchestrates crawling and AI calls. Port 3000, ~300 MB RAM at idle.
2. Meilisearch — full-text search engine, indexes all saved content. Internal only (port 7700). ~200 MB RAM at idle.
3. Alpine Chrome (headless) — crawls URLs and takes screenshots on behalf of the app. Internal only (port 9222). ~300 MB RAM at idle.
Total at idle: 800 MB–1.2 GB. A 2 GB ServOrbit VPS is comfortable; a 4 GB VPS is recommended if you're also running Ollama on the same machine.
Self-hosting Karakeep on a VPS: step by step
Logging in for the first time
Open the URL then click "Sign up": the very first account registered becomes the administrator of the instance. Create it immediately.
Pair Karakeep with n8n for automated saving
Karakeep's REST API accepts POST /api/v1/bookmarks with {"url": "...", "title": "..."}. In n8n, an HTTP Request node can push URLs from RSS feeds, newsletters, Slack links or any webhook directly into Karakeep — no browser required.
Karakeep as an AI knowledge base
The combination of Karakeep + Ollama on a single VPS gives you a fully private, self-hosted knowledge base where an LLM reads and tags everything you save, and full-text search finds it again instantly — with no data leaving your server.
Karakeep also exposes a search API — GET /api/v1/bookmarks?q=query — that n8n workflows or LLM agents can query. Your saved knowledge becomes a private, queryable dataset rather than a graveyard of forgotten tabs.
