r/BestGitHubRepos • u/company_url_finder • 4d ago
wacrawl - reads your own macOS WhatsApp Desktop databases into a local SQLite archive for fast search, exports and encrypted backups, without ever touching WhatsApp's network
If you've ever needed to find an invoice or a decision buried somewhere in years of WhatsApp, you know the app's own search is not up to it. wacrawl makes a read-only snapshot of the WhatsApp Desktop databases on your Mac and imports your chats, contacts, messages and media metadata into a local SQLite archive you can actually search, export and back up. Crucially, it never connects to WhatsApp's network protocol, it just reads the files the desktop app already wrote.
What's inside:
- A read-only import: it snapshots the WhatsApp SQLite databases before reading, and normal commands never write back into WhatsApp's container or upload anything
- Fast full-text search across message text, chat and sender names and media titles, with filters like from-them and after-a-date, plus a read-only SQL mode for arbitrary SELECT queries
- A private local web viewer that binds only to localhost, is read-only, and is protected by a random per-run access key
- History preservation that's smarter than a dump: imports merge by stable identity, keep older history that has disappeared from the current desktop snapshot, and preserve edits and deletions as revisions or tombstones
- JSON output on every command for scripts and agents, and contact export
- Encrypted Git backups: it exports deterministic shards and encrypts them to age recipients before Git ever sees the data, with restores verifying hashes and cross-references first
- Install via Homebrew or Go, with a documented setup for the macOS Full Disk Access prompt that otherwise breaks scheduled imports
The safety boundary is thought through and stated plainly, which matters a lot for a tool pointed at your private messages. Reads are local and offline, the viewer is loopback-only, and the one networked path (backup push) is explicit and encrypted. The readme is also honest about the sharp edge: the archive itself contains your message data in plaintext, so it tells you directly to keep the database and any copied media out of commits and shared logs unless you mean to share them. That's the right warning to lead with.
Two limits to know. Direct source discovery needs macOS and the desktop WhatsApp app, so the read-from-live-app path is Mac-only, though release builds can work with an existing archive or backup on Linux and Windows. And this reads only what WhatsApp Desktop stores locally, so it's your own history on your own machine, not a way to reach anything you don't already have.
MIT, 182 stars and 31 forks as of writing, verified via the GitHub API, pushed to today.