bisc/README.md

# Bisc

### A small tool that clears cookies (and more)

Websites can store unwanted data using all sorts of methods: besides
the usual cookies, there are also the local and session storage, the
IndexedDB API and more caches as well.

bisc will try to go through each of them and remove all information from
websites that are not explicitly allowed (ie. a whitelist of domains).
It was created for qutebrowser, but it actually supports the storage
format used by Chromium-based browsers, which (sadly) means almost
every one nowadays.

## Installation

bisc is a Haskell program available on [Hackage][hackage] and can
be installed with one of the Haskell package managers. For
example, with [cabal-install][cabal] you would do
```
cabal install bisc
```
and similarly for [stack][stack].

Alternatively, if you are using Nix or NixOS, bisc is available
under the attribute `haskellPackages.bisc`. It should also be in
the Nix binary cache so you don't have to build from source.

Finally, statically compiled binaries can be found in the
[releases](/git/rnhmjoj/bisc/releases).

[hackage]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/bisc
[cabal]: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/blob/master/cabal-install/README.md
[stack]: https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/README/

## Configuration

The bisc configuration file is `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bisc/bisc.conf`.
It allows to change the paths of the QtWebEngine/Chromium
directory and the whitelist file.
The default settings are:
```
whitelist-path = "$(XDG_CONFIG_HOME)/qutebrowser/whitelists/cookies"
webengine-path = "$(XDG_DATA_HOME)/qutebrowser/webengine"
```

If you want a different location for the configuration file, you can change it
using the `--config` command line option.

## Usage

Create an empty whitelist file and write the domains of the
allowed cookies, one per line.
Eg.
```
.example.com
example.com
```

Run `bisc` to delete all non-whitelisted data from qutebrowser.
Run `bisc --dry-run` to see what would be deleted without actually doing it.

Note that running bisc while the browser is open is not safe: this means it
could possibly **corrupt** the databases. Hoever, corruption in the sqllite
databases (Cookies and QuotaManager) has never happened or been reported to me
and the LevelDB ones (LocalStorage, SessionStorage, IndexedDB), while they do
corrupt more often, are automatically repaired by bisc.

## License

Copyright (C) 2021 Michele Guerini Rocco

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.