PWAA
Pack full web manuals into a single offline file. Zero CORS.
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PWAA - Pack full web manuals into a single offline file. Zero CORS.

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PWAA solves modern offline web portability. Unlike legacy formats that break JS/CORS, PWAA packs your SPA or documentation (HTML,React/Vue/Next) into a ZIP container. The native reader never extracts to disk; it maps the ZIP to memory and spins up an ephemeral local HTTP server. Your code thinks it's online, bypassing CORS instantly. Heavy media and virtual routing work perfectly offline from a single file. Specs and SDK are fully open-source. Say goodbye to broken offline archives!

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Hi Product Hunt! 👋 I built PWAA (Portable Web Application Archive) out of absolute necessity, because the industry has systematically failed at modern offline web portability. Historically, we had Microsoft's .CHM, which was great for documentation but turned into a malware nightmare. Then we got EPUB 3, which theoretically supports HTML5/JS, but in practice, e-readers aggressively sandbox it, block JS, and break CORS, making it useless for modern web apps. Single-file formats like .MHTML instantly break when you have complex routing. WARC (Web ARChive) is the gold standard for institutional preservation, but it’s scarily complex for the average user and requires dedicated playback servers (Replay Servers). What was missing in the market was a universal container: a file capable of storing all the complexity of modern frameworks (React, Vue, WebGL) and delivering a fast, interactive, and encapsulated experience with a simple double-click, supported by the native technologies of modern operating systems. This is where the PWAA format was born. PWAA was engineered to fill this exact void. It packs an entire web app into a standard PKZIP container, but the native reader never extracts it to the disk. Instead, it spins up an ephemeral in-memory HTTP server (127.0.0.1) to serve the bytes directly to a local WebView. Because the code thinks it's running on a real server, it completely bypasses CORS restrictions. Heavy SPAs (React, Next.js, Vue) and heavy media work natively offline from a single double-clickable file with zero memory leaks. It even includes an SPA Fallback mechanism so virtual routing never hits a 404. The architectural spec and SDK are entirely open in the repo for anyone to inspect or use to build their own readers. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the VFS architecture and this approach to offline archival!