Bye-bye Pocket, Hello Poche!

Productivity Sauce

Finally, there is a self-hosted open source alternative to Pocket and Instapaper. Poche is a relatively new project, but it already shows a lot of promise. The application is easy to deploy and it provides all basic functionality which lets you save web pages for later perusal. Written in PHP, Poche will happily run on a machine with the Apache web server, PHP, and the SQLite database engine. To install Poche, grab the latest version of the application from the project's website, unpack the downloaded archive, rename the resulting directory to poche, and move it to the root of your server. Make the poche directory writable by the server using the chown www-data -R poche command, and point your browser to the Poche installation. Create a new user profile, and you are done.

Pocket users will be pleased to learn that Poche can import data from the popular service. To do this, export your Pocket data in the HTML format, and place the exported file in the poche directory on your server. Point then the browser to http://yourserver/poche/import.php and import the data. Note that the import operation may take a while, and the developer recommends to run the import.php script locally.

To save pages for later use, you have to install the Poche bookmarklet. Switch to the Config section and add the poche it ! bookmarklet to your browser.

Poche does have a few shortcomings. There is no Android app, so you can't read saved pages on your mobile device when offline, the application doesn't allow you to view saved entries as a list, and there is no search feature. However, a new version of Poche which addresses some of the shortcomings and introduces new features is right around the corner.