Liberate a website

What you produce: a directory that runs on its own — every retained route, its CSS, media, fonts, navigation, same-page anchors, and responsive behavior, with references rewritten to point inside the copy.

HTML is the contract. That directory is the deliverable, not an intermediate step toward a platform.

The CLI does the work. Your job is to run it, read what it reports, verify the result, and tell the operator what they got.

The whole surface

Command	What it does
data-liberation inspect <url>	Bounded read-only source assessment with explicit coverage and unknowns
data-liberation <url>	Detect the platform, discover routes, liberate every one, write the site
data-liberation compare <run-dir>	Verify the copy against its live source. This is the acceptance gate
data-liberation publish <run-dir> --to <target>	Put the copy on a live URL

Step 1 — Liberate

data-liberation https://example.com/

Writes the site and exits, reporting two lines:

Liberated 12/12 routes (3 reused)
Site: /Users/you/data-liberation/example.com/website

The run directory is that path with website removed — pass it to compare and publish.

• --output <dir> chooses where the run lands. Default is ~/data-liberation/<host-slug>.
• --resume reuses what is already on disk and reports it as reused. Add it when re-running against a site you have already liberated; without it the run captures the source again.
• --screenshots adds desktop and mobile PNGs when the operator wants visual evidence.
• Leave fluid learning on. It is what keeps the copy reflowing like the source instead of freezing at one width.

Step 2 — Verify

data-liberation compare <run-dir>

This runs two tiers, and the report says which found what.

Self-consistency, over every route, offline. Does the copy work on its own terms — every same-page and cross-page anchor resolving to exactly one target, every internal link landing on a real file, no asset still pointing at the origin. This needs no browser and no network, so it covers the whole site in milliseconds.

Source fidelity, over a sample, in a browser. Does the copy still match the original — text, geometry and reflow at widths the capture never sampled, and dialogs opening as the source opens them. Each check is a live round trip costing roughly 25 seconds, so it runs on the entrypoint plus a spread of other routes rather than all of them.

Exit 0 means accepted. Exit 1 means report it. Each failure names what diverged:

self-consistency FAIL anchor-ambiguous: 1 route(s) — / /index.html#introduction matches 2 targets
/anchor/ 1600px FAIL: text 62 chars !== source 707

The closing line states the scope measured, and both tiers must pass:

Passed: 4 route(s) checked offline, 4 of 4 compared to source, against https://example.com/

When that line shows fewer routes compared than captured, source fidelity was sampled — say so when reporting, rather than describing the whole site as verified. Add --screenshots to write source, copy, and diff PNGs. The pixel score is evidence for a human; pass or fail comes from the named checks.

Step 3 — Publish

Run this when the operator asks for a live URL.

data-liberation publish <run-dir> --to <target>

Ask the operator where it should go. spacefast is the default when --to is omitted. To see what a build actually offers, name a target that does not exist — the error lists the registered ones:

Unknown publish target "list". Available: spacefast.

A publish reports the same shape whichever target serves it:

Published 1 files to spacefast.
Live: https://gzipped-nest.view.fast/
Version: https://v1--gzipped-nest.view.fast/
This space is private by default, so the live URL returns 403 until access is granted.
Claim it to keep it: https://my.spacefast.com/claim#sfc_…
Claim expires: 2026-08-28T06:58:13.658Z

Give the operator every line of that. A claim link and its deadline matter most. When a target publishes anonymously, the space belongs to nobody until it is claimed, and it can stay private meanwhile — the run above answers 403 to everyone until the operator acts on the link. Reporting the live URL alone would tell them the publish worked and leave them looking at an error.

--token, or the target's token environment variable such as SPACEFAST_TOKEN, publishes into an account they already own.

Publishing reads what is on disk, so a repaired copy or a different target can ship without touching the source site again.

Showing the copy to a human

data-liberation https://example.com/ --resume --serve

--serve keeps a local server running on the copy until it is interrupted, so offer it when someone wants to browse the result. With --resume alongside it, the site is already on disk and the server comes up immediately. Every run that does not serve prints this same command on stderr.

Run it only when a human is waiting for it, since the command holds until interrupted.

What a run leaves behind

Path	Contents
website/	The deliverable. Serve this directory anywhere
capture-receipt.json	Source URL, route table mapping each page to the URL it came from, assets, profile
diagnostics.json	Everything the source withheld or the capture could not resolve
source-profile.json	Measured behavior: one document or per-device, declarative or runtime-written geometry, switch width

Reporting a run

Give the operator:

1. Routes liberated, reused, and failed, from the CLI's own summary.
2. The compare result per width, quoting any failure text verbatim.
3. Any diagnostics.json key that came back non-empty, named and counted.

The keys worth surfacing are failures, resourceFailures, unresolvedDependencies, unresolvedMedia, unresolvedAnchors, interactionFailures, excludedRoutes, and duplicateRoutes.

Reading a compare failure

Failure text	Where to look
widest image … Δ or doc width	Geometry froze at the capture width — confirm fluid learning ran, in source-profile.json under geometry and learned
nav … same-page anchor(s) missing or match more than one target	diagnostics.unresolvedAnchors names the fragment and the reason
copy requested N external host(s)	diagnostics.unresolvedDependencies and resourceFailures
internal link(s) 404	diagnostics.excludedRoutes and duplicateRoutes, plus the route table in the receipt
title … !== source or text … chars	Compare the receipt's route table against the URL the source actually serves

Report the failure and the matching diagnostics together, so the operator sees both the symptom and the evidence.

Done

A liberation is complete when compare exits 0 and the operator has the run directory, the route counts, and any unresolved entries. A live URL is complete when publish has reported it, along with the claim link when the publish was anonymous.