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What is aicrawl?

veteranbv/aicrawl — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

34GoAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · moderate

In one sentence

aicrawl is a Go command-line tool that imports official Claude and ChatGPT export files into a local, searchable SQLite archive with Markdown export.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((aicrawl))
    What it does
      Local AI chat archive
      Import Claude and ChatGPT exports
      Full text search
      Markdown export
    Tech stack
      Go
      SQLite
      FTS5
    Use cases
      Search old conversations
      Export to Markdown
      Run SQL queries locally
    Limits
      No cloud sync
      No browser automation
      No embeddings

Code map

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Import an official Claude or ChatGPT export ZIP into a local searchable archive.

USE CASE 2

Search across all imported conversations by keyword using full-text search.

USE CASE 3

Export a full archive or a single conversation to Markdown files for reading or backup.

What is it built with?

GoSQLiteFTS5

How does it compare?

veteranbv/aicrawlmengmengcode/clicd0hardik1/kubesplaining
Stars343433
LanguageGoGoGo
Setup difficultymoderatemoderateeasy
Complexity2/54/53/5
Audiencedeveloperops devopsops devops

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires Go 1.26.2 or newer to build, since a dependency (crawlkit) needs that toolchain version.

No license file mentioned in the README, so usage terms are unclear.

So what is it?

aicrawl is a command-line tool written in Go for building a private local archive of your AI conversation history. It imports official export files from Claude and ChatGPT, stores the conversations in a local SQLite database, and provides search and export capabilities over the stored data. It does not call any cloud API during import or search. The import process accepts the ZIP or JSON export files that Claude and ChatGPT provide through their official export features. Once imported, conversations and messages are stored in the database along with the original raw JSON payloads. Message content is indexed using FTS5, which is SQLite's built-in full-text search system, so you can search across all your conversations with a keyword query and filter or group results by conversation. Beyond basic search, the tool supports retrieving messages around a specific message ID for context, exporting entire conversations or the full archive to Markdown files, and running arbitrary read-only SQL queries against the database directly. A set of structured output commands for automation returns JSON, including metadata, status, and a diagnostic check. The tool is explicit about what it does not do in version 0.1. It does not scrape session tokens, automate browser interactions, support embeddings or semantic search, or provide a graphical interface. It does not sync to the cloud, run as a background daemon, or import data back into the AI services. The project requires Go 1.26.2 or newer to build, which the README notes is required by a dependency called crawlkit. Export files and the generated archive database contain private conversation data, and the README advises keeping them in paths excluded from version control.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Walk me through building aicrawl from source and importing my Claude export ZIP.
Prompt 2
Show me how to search my imported conversations for a keyword and export the results as Markdown.
Prompt 3
What does aicrawl explicitly not support in version 0.1, like browser automation or cloud sync?
Prompt 4
Explain how aicrawl's SQLite schema stores conversations, messages, and raw JSON payloads.

Frequently asked questions

What is aicrawl?

aicrawl is a Go command-line tool that imports official Claude and ChatGPT export files into a local, searchable SQLite archive with Markdown export.

What language is aicrawl written in?

Mainly Go. The stack also includes Go, SQLite, FTS5.

What license does aicrawl use?

No license file mentioned in the README, so usage terms are unclear.

How hard is aicrawl to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is aicrawl for?

Mainly developer.

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