Self-hosted, for Android
Share a post, get it back as a clean pack
A personal project, published in case it is useful. No support promise: it may break whenever Instagram or Facebook change something.
Share an Instagram or Facebook post from your Android phone to Sharewerk and get back every image of a carousel, key frames and a transcript for videos, and the caption as text. Then pass it on to an AI chat app, a messenger or anything else in the share menu.
- Prototype
- Version 0.1.1
- Apache-2.0
- Docker Compose
- Android with Chrome
- Instagram & Facebook
The problem
No more screenshots of every slide.
Passing on a carousel means a screenshot of every slide, and a reel a screen recording. Sharewerk fetches the post itself: its pictures, its caption as text and, for videos, key frames and what is said.
Features
What it does
From the share menu
Installed from Chrome, Sharewerk appears in Android's share menu. The phone only sends the link; downloading and processing happen on your server.
Images that read well
Every image as JPEG with a long edge of 1568 px: sharp enough to read text, small enough to share fast.
Videos as frames and text
Key frames at scene changes and a timestamped transcript, made with ffmpeg and faster-whisper on your server.
The whole post in one share
A post.txt with source, author, date, caption and an index of all pictures. Android takes at most 10 files per share; more pictures are combined into numbered contact sheets.
Your server, your login
An access token of its own, or none behind an authenticating proxy such as Pomerium, oauth2-proxy or Authelia. English and German, light and dark.
Kept current
Instagram and Facebook change constantly. The image is rebuilt every Monday with the newest gallery-dl and yt-dlp, so updating is a pull.
Cookies, terms and rights
Instagram shows almost nothing to logged-out visitors, so Sharewerk needs the cookies of a logged-in account. Use a secondary account: automated access to Instagram and Facebook is against Meta's terms of use, and accounts used this way can be rate-limited or blocked. The content of a post belongs to its author. Sharewerk is a tool for personal use, and you are responsible for how you use it.
Security
- The downloaders only receive links on an allowlist of Instagram and Facebook hosts, so the server cannot be made to fetch other or internal addresses.
- The container runs as a non-root user with a read-only root filesystem and no Linux capabilities.
- The cookie file is a logged-in session: treat it like a password. Only the container user can read it.
- Results are deleted after 24 hours by default, or right away from the list of recently prepared posts.
- Never run it as an open service for other people: the cookies are yours, and so is the responsibility for what is downloaded with them.
- The container images carry a signed build provenance.
Install
Installation
Requirements
- A server with Docker and Docker Compose; 2 CPU cores and 3 GB RAM are plenty
- A domain with HTTPS in front of it: web apps install only from secure origins
- An Android phone with Chrome; iPhone is not supported
- For Instagram: the cookies of a secondary account
On your server
With Docker and Docker Compose:
git clone https://github.com/Azentrius/sharewerk.git
cd sharewerk
cp .env.example .env
sed -i "s/^SHAREWERK_AUTH_TOKEN=.*/SHAREWERK_AUTH_TOKEN=$(openssl rand -hex 32)/" .env
mkdir -p secrets
docker compose up -d
Sharewerk now listens on 127.0.0.1:8080, from the prebuilt image ghcr.io/azentrius/sharewerk:latest. Put a TLS reverse proxy in front of it, for example Caddy:
sharewerk.example.com {
reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8080
}
The first video you process downloads the Whisper speech model (about 500 MB for small) into the data volume.
Cookies for Instagram
Log in to a secondary account in a browser profile of its own, export its cookies in Netscape cookies.txt format and close the profile without logging out. Copy the file to the server, put it in place for the container user and delete the copy:
sudo install -o 10001 -g 10001 -m 600 cookies.txt secrets/cookies.txt
shred -u cookies.txt
Delete the export on your computer as well. When Sharewerk reports “login required”, export the cookies again. The README explains each step.
On the phone
- Open your Sharewerk address in Chrome and sign in with the token from
.env. - In Chrome’s menu, choose Install app.
- In Instagram, tap Share and pick Sharewerk. When the pack is ready, tap Share and pick the app to pass it on to.
Updating
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
gh attestation verify oci://ghcr.io/azentrius/sharewerk:latest --repo Azentrius/sharewerk
Behind Pomerium or another authenticating proxy, all settings and troubleshooting: see the README.
Questions
Does it work on an iPhone?
No. Safari does not implement the Web Share Target API, so a web app cannot appear in the iOS share sheet.
Why does it need cookies?
Instagram shows almost nothing to logged-out visitors. Use a secondary account, not your main one. Facebook videos often work without cookies.
Where is a post processed?
On your server. The phone only sends the link; the server downloads and processes the post and deletes the results after 24 hours by default.
What if downloads start failing?
Usually Instagram or Facebook changed something, and a newer gallery-dl or yt-dlp fixes it. Pull the image again: it is rebuilt every week.
Is there an app to download?
No. Sharewerk is a web app: you open your Sharewerk address in Chrome and install it from Chrome's menu.