How to Archive a Reddit User's Full Public History in One Command
Use RedLens to pull a Redditor's complete public posts and comments into a local SQLite file — no API keys, no account, and nothing leaves your machine.
By The RedLens Project ·
Public Reddit history disappears all the time: accounts get deleted, subreddits go private, moderators purge threads. If you’re researching a discussion — a topic, a community, or one prolific account — the safe move is to archive it locally before it vanishes. RedLens does that in one command.
What you need
- Python 3.11 or newer
pip install redlens(MIT-licensed, two runtime dependencies)
No Reddit account and no API key. RedLens reads public data through arctic-shift, a free mirror of public Reddit history, so there’s no OAuth registration and no rate-limit negotiation with Reddit itself.
Archive an account
redlens sync spez
That pulls every public post and comment the account has made into a single SQLite database on your machine (the location comes from platformdirs; redlens list shows what you have). The sync is incremental — run it again next week and it only fetches what’s new.
Look at what you got
redlens show spez
redlens serve
show prints a summary in the terminal; serve opens a local dashboard with activity over time, subreddit breakdowns, and drill-downs into individual threads. If you want a file you can keep or send to a colleague, redlens page and redlens report emit standalone HTML — and reports can pseudonymize usernames before you share them.
Get the data out
Everything is plain SQLite, so you can query it directly — but for most workflows redlens export is faster:
redlens export spez --format jsonl
JSON, CSV, and JSONL are supported, so the archive drops straight into pandas, a spreadsheet, or whatever pipeline you already run.
Why local-first matters
An archive you control can’t be retroactively edited, deleted, or paywalled. One SQLite file is easy to back up, easy to diff, and easy to delete when a project ends — which is exactly the custody story you want when the data is other people’s public speech. Nothing RedLens collects ever leaves your machine unless you export it.
Next: once you’re tracking more than one account, the interesting questions are about how accounts behave together — see our guide to detecting coordinated posting networks.
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