How to Self-Host Wallabag 2026

TL;DR

Wallabag (MIT, ~10K GitHub stars, PHP/Symfony) is the open source Pocket replacement. Save articles from the web for offline reading — browser extensions, mobile apps (iOS/Android), and Kindle delivery. It fetches full article text, stores it on your server, lets you highlight and annotate, and syncs read state across all devices. Pocket Premium costs $44.99/year. Wallabag is free to self-host. Unlike Shiori (bookmark manager), Wallabag is focused purely on read-later with highlights, annotations, and reading progress.

Key Takeaways

• Wallabag: MIT, ~10K stars, PHP — read-later tool, offline article storage with full text
• Highlights and annotations: Select text to highlight in yellow, add personal notes
• Kindle delivery: Send saved articles to your Kindle e-reader
• Mobile apps: Official iOS and Android apps with offline sync
• Browser extensions: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera — save with one click
• Pocket/Instapaper import: Import your reading list from Pocket, Instapaper, or Pinboard

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Wallabag vs Pocket vs Shiori

Feature	Wallabag	Pocket	Shiori
License	MIT	Proprietary	MIT
Cost	Free (hosting)	Free / $44.99/yr	Free
Full-text fetch	Yes	Yes	Yes
Highlights	Yes	No (free), Yes (Premium)	No
Annotations	Yes	No	No
Kindle delivery	Yes	Yes (Premium)	No
Tags	Yes	Yes	Yes
Archive / Screenshot	No	No	No
Reading time estimate	Yes	Yes	No
iOS app	Yes (official)	Yes	Via browser
Android app	Yes (official)	Yes	Via browser
RSS output	Yes	Yes	No

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Part 1: Docker Setup

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  wallabag:
    image: wallabag/wallabag:latest
    container_name: wallabag
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    depends_on:
      - wallabag_db
      - wallabag_redis
    volumes:
      - wallabag_data:/var/www/wallabag/data
      - wallabag_images:/var/www/wallabag/web/assets/images
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD}"
      SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_DRIVER: pdo_mysql
      SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_HOST: wallabag_db
      SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_PORT: 3306
      SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_NAME: wallabag
      SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_USER: wallabag
      SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_PASSWORD: "${MYSQL_PASSWORD}"
      SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_DSN: "smtp://smtp.yourdomain.com:587?username=noreply@yourdomain.com&password=${SMTP_PASSWORD}"
      SYMFONY__ENV__FROM_EMAIL: "noreply@yourdomain.com"
      SYMFONY__ENV__DOMAIN_NAME: "https://read.yourdomain.com"
      SYMFONY__ENV__SERVER_NAME: "Wallabag"
      SYMFONY__ENV__REDIS_HOST: wallabag_redis
      SYMFONY__ENV__TWOFACTOR_AUTH: "false"
      POPULATE_DATABASE: "true"          # Set to false after first run

  wallabag_db:
    image: mariadb:11
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - wallabag_db_data:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD}"
      MYSQL_DATABASE: wallabag
      MYSQL_USER: wallabag
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: "${MYSQL_PASSWORD}"

  wallabag_redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  wallabag_data:
  wallabag_images:
  wallabag_db_data:

# .env
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=your-root-password
MYSQL_PASSWORD=your-db-password
SMTP_PASSWORD=your-smtp-password

docker compose up -d

Visit http://your-server:8080 — default credentials: wallabag / wallabag. Change immediately.

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Part 2: HTTPS with Caddy

read.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:8080
}

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Part 3: Initial Setup

1. Log in with wallabag / wallabag
2. Top-right menu → Config → Settings
3. Change your password
4. Set your language and timezone
5. After first run, set POPULATE_DATABASE: "false" in docker-compose.yml to prevent re-seeding

Create Additional Users

1. Admin panel → Users → Create a user
2. Set username, email, password

Or via CLI:

docker exec wallabag php bin/console wallabag:user:create \
  --username bob --password secret --email bob@yourdomain.com

---

Part 4: Browser Extensions

Chrome/Chromium: Install from Chrome Web Store

Firefox: Install from Firefox Add-ons

Configure the extension:

• Wallabag URL: https://read.yourdomain.com
• Username + password
• Click the extension icon on any article page → saves immediately

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Part 5: Mobile Apps

iOS App

1. Install Wallabag 2 iOS from App Store
2. Server: https://read.yourdomain.com
3. Username + password
4. App downloads all articles for offline reading

Android App

1. Install Wallabag 2 from Play Store (or F-Droid)
2. Same server URL and credentials
3. Articles sync for offline reading

iOS/Android Share Sheet

Once the app is installed:

1. In Safari/Chrome → Share → Wallabag
2. Article is saved instantly

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Part 6: Kindle Delivery

Send your reading list to Kindle for reading on e-ink:

1. Config → Kindle → enter your @kindle.com email address
2. Add noreply@yourdomain.com to your approved Kindle senders (in Amazon settings)
3. On any article: Actions → Send to Kindle

Wallabag converts the article to a clean Kindle-friendly format and emails it.

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Part 7: Highlights and Annotations

Select any text in an article → Highlight or Annotate:

• Highlights: Mark important text in yellow
• Annotations: Add your own notes attached to a text selection

View all your annotations: Annotations in the sidebar.

Export annotations:

# Via API:
curl "https://read.yourdomain.com/api/annotations.json?page=1" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"

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Part 8: Import from Pocket / Instapaper

From Pocket

1. Pocket: Settings → Export → Request export → download pocket.html
2. Wallabag: Import → Pocket → upload the HTML file

From Instapaper

1. Instapaper: Settings → Export CSV → download CSV
2. Wallabag: Import → Instapaper → upload CSV

From Pinboard

1. Pinboard: Settings → Backup → JSON
2. Wallabag: Import → Pinboard → upload JSON

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Part 9: REST API

# Get OAuth token:
TOKEN=$(curl -s -X POST https://read.yourdomain.com/oauth/v2/token \
  -d 'grant_type=password&client_id=CLIENT_ID&client_secret=CLIENT_SECRET&username=wallabag&password=wallabag' \
  | jq -r .access_token)

# Create OAuth client first:
docker exec wallabag php bin/console wallabag:client:create --name "myapp"

# Save an article:
curl -X POST https://read.yourdomain.com/api/entries.json \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com/article","tags":"tech,readlater"}'

# List unread articles:
curl "https://read.yourdomain.com/api/entries.json?archive=0&page=1&perPage=10" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" | jq '._embedded.items[].title'

# Mark as read:
curl -X PATCH "https://read.yourdomain.com/api/entries/42.json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"archive":1}'

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Part 10: RSS Feeds

Every tag and category in Wallabag has an RSS feed — subscribe in FreshRSS or any reader:

# All unread articles as RSS:
https://read.yourdomain.com/feed/alice/TOKEN/unread

# Tagged "tech":
https://read.yourdomain.com/feed/alice/TOKEN/tags/tech

# Get your RSS token:
Config → RSS → Generate token

---

Maintenance

# Update Wallabag:
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

# Run migrations after update:
docker exec wallabag php bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate --no-interaction

# Backup database:
docker exec wallabag_db mysqldump -u wallabag -p"${MYSQL_PASSWORD}" wallabag \
  | gzip > wallabag-db-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz

# Backup images:
tar -czf wallabag-images-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz \
  $(docker volume inspect wallabag_wallabag_images --format '{{.Mountpoint}}')

# Logs:
docker compose logs -f wallabag

Why Self-Host Wallabag?

The case for self-hosting Wallabag comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Wallabag means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Wallabag, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Wallabag headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Wallabag data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Wallabag without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Wallabag's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Wallabag backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Wallabag's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Wallabag's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Wallabag's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Wallabag's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f wallabag

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Wallabag's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

1. Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
2. Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
3. If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
4. If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats wallabag. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Wallabag Updated

Wallabag follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Wallabag is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

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See all open source read-later and bookmark tools at OSSAlt.com/categories/productivity.