ot — OneTab CLI

A CLI that reads your OneTab Chrome extension data directly off disk. No browser automation, no network, no extension API. Just your Chrome profile's storage files.

It handles every layer OneTab/Chrome puts between you and the data:

• chrome.storage.local LevelDB (the legacy snapshot)
• Chromium IndexedDB LevelDB (where current OneTab data lives), including the custom idb_cmp1 comparator that prevents normal LevelDB libraries from opening it
• Snappy-compressed SSTable blocks
• LevelDB log fragmentation
• Blink's IDB value envelope (version varint + wrapper version + trailer offset)
• V8's structured-clone format

Install

npm install

Requires Node ≥ 20. Built and tested on macOS; the Chrome path discovery covers ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/{Default,Profile N}.

Usage

node bin/onetab.js [command] [flags]

Available commands:

Command	What it shows
stats	(default) summary: groups, tabs, top domains, install date
paths	every OneTab LevelDB store discovered on disk
groups	each tab group with size, label, creation date
tabs	every saved tab (title + URL)
domains	top domains across all saved tabs
meta	extension settings (install date, theme, share prefs, …)
orphans	tabs not in any visible group (e.g. items in the trash folder)
raw	dump every LevelDB record we found, decoded where possible
export	emit everything as JSON on stdout

Flags:

• --profile <name> — pick a specific Chrome profile (Default, Profile 1, …)
• --kind local|idb — restrict to one storage backend
• --path <dir> — read a LevelDB directory directly

Examples

node bin/onetab.js                    # default stats
node bin/onetab.js groups             # list groups
node bin/onetab.js export > out.json  # full dump (gitignored)
node bin/onetab.js raw --kind idb     # see decoded V8 records

How it works

1. Discovery — walk Chrome's profile directories looking for OneTab's storage in two places: the legacy chrome.storage.local directory and the modern IndexedDB/chrome-extension_<id>_0.indexeddb.leveldb.
2. Lock-free copy — Chrome holds an exclusive LOCK on every LevelDB while running, so we copy the files to a tempdir before reading.
3. Two readers —
   • Local store: opened with classic-level (plain LevelDB).
   • IndexedDB store: parsed directly from .ldb SSTables and .log files, bypassing the idb_cmp1 comparator that LevelDB refuses to honor.
4. Decode — IDB values are wrapped: varint(leveldb_version) → 0xff varint(blink_wrapper_version) → optional 0xfe + 12-byte trailer info → 0xff varint(v8_version) → V8 structured-clone bytes. A minimal V8 deserializer reconstructs the original JS objects.
5. Assemble — modern OneTab stores groups and tabs as separate records linked via parentIds / childIds. We reconstruct the tree.

Project layout

bin/onetab.js   CLI entry point
lib/store.js    discovery, dispatch, schema extraction
lib/sstable.js  SSTable + log reader (Snappy, restart-array iteration)
lib/v8clone.js  V8 structured-clone deserializer
lib/report.js   summarization + formatting helpers

Caveats

• Read-only. The tool never writes back to Chrome's storage.
• macOS paths only out of the box. Linux/Windows discovery would need its own branch in discoverStores.
• OneTab schema is undocumented and changes between versions. Tested against OneTab 2.14.