Argos

July 4, 2026 · View on GitHub

This page summarises each release at a high level. For the full technical changelog see CHANGELOG.md.

v2.1.1-beta — 2026-07-04

Robustness release: setup.sh no longer aborts outside the happy path.

Clear error when the repo is not where expected. If the repository has not been cloned to ~/Downloads/Argos, the script now stops immediately with an explicit message instead of failing mid-install with a bare line number. The source path is centralised in one ARGOS_SRC variable.

Survives minimal or non-standard systems. ~/Templates is created if missing, empty source directories are skipped with a warning instead of killing the install, and /etc/apt/keyrings is created before deploying the VSCodium signing key (its absence silently skipped VSCodium on clean 24.04 systems).

No more surprise reboots. The final reboot now requires an interactive terminal. In headless or piped runs the script prints a notice and lets the user reboot manually.

Repo hygiene and GitHub housekeeping. ShellCheck now runs in CI on every push and PR; a SECURITY.md policy was added; .idea/ and internal changes.txt notes were removed from tracking. On the GitHub side: Issues re-enabled (the README pointed to them but they were off), the placeholder GitHub Pages site and its gh-pages branch removed, and the pre-rewrite 2019-2022 history preserved under the archive/pre-rewrite tag.

v2.1.0-beta — 2026-07-04

Exploratores added and wired into Firefox; GUI launchers for uncovered tools; Elasticsearch replaced with Shodan; script bug fixes.

Highlights

Exploratores installed locally. Exploratores (from SOsintOps, the same project behind the Speculator policies) is a browser-based OSINT toolkit: curated search tools, a PII redactor, multi-country IBAN analysis, and an embedded CyberChef — all static HTML/CSS/JS, no backend, all processing client-side. setup.sh clones it to ~/Documents/Exploratores.

Firefox integration, three ways.

Firefox homepage set to the local launchme.html (changeable by the user — the policy is not locked).
"Exploratores" bookmark in the managed "Local Tools" OSINT bookmark folder.
New exploratores.desktop shortcut in the application menu that opens the toolkit in Firefox.

To support local file:// URLs, setup.sh now deploys policies.json with __HOME__ placeholder substitution, the same mechanism used for the .desktop files.

Previously uncovered tools now reachable from the menu. user-scanner, linkook, and socialscan (installed since v2.0.6 but with no launcher) are now menu entries inside the Usernames tool. PhoneInfoga gets its own phoneinfoga.desktop shortcut, launching its web UI on http://127.0.0.1:5000 like SpiderFoot.

Elasticsearch-Crawler replaced with Shodan. The dead Elasticsearch-Crawler script (only a deprecation warning) has been removed. In its place, a Shodan CLI wrapper prompts for the API key on first use, then runs searches and shows the results.

Reliability and consistency fixes.

amass enum no longer passes the removed -src flag (broke on Amass v4).
Blackbird now opens the folder where it actually writes results.
EyeWitness prefers its virtualenv and reports failures clearly.
setup.sh no longer aborts the whole install if the Obsidian or VSCodium downloads fail.
All launcher UI messages are now English-only.

v2.0.7-beta — 2026-04-30

Firefox customisation rewritten from scratch.

Highlights

Zip-based profile template replaced by enterprise policies.json. The previous method used a ~50 MB zip archive (argosfox/argos-ff-template.zip) containing a full Firefox profile snapshot from 2022, including stale telemetry, old cookies databases, and deprecated extensions (HTTPS Everywhere). The script had to launch Firefox, wait 15 seconds for a profile directory to appear, then extract and overwrite it.

The new method deploys a single config/policies.json file (based on the Speculator Project) to the Firefox distribution directory. It works on both snap (/etc/firefox/policies/) and deb (/usr/lib/firefox/distribution/) installs. No profile detection, no zip handling, no Firefox auto-launch.

What the policies.json configures:

Privacy: telemetry, studies, Pocket, form history, password manager disabled. Tracking protection set to strict. WebRTC, geolocation, battery API, beacon, DNS prefetch disabled. Fingerprinting resistance enabled.
Permissions: camera, microphone, location, notifications blocked. Autoplay blocked.
Sanitise on shutdown: cache, cookies, history, sessions, form data cleared automatically.
Extensions (12): uBlock Origin, CanvasBlocker, ClearURLs, Multi-Account Containers, EXIF Viewer, Wayback Machine, GPS Detect, Search by Image, Nimbus Screenshot, Resurrect Pages, Link Gopher, Mitaka.
Managed bookmarks: OSINT folder tree with Person Investigation, Domain & Infrastructure, Image & Media, Geolocation, Archives, Social Media, Local Tools, and Resources subfolders.

v2.0.6-beta — 2026-04-08

Toolset update replacing an abandoned tool and adding three new OSINT tools.

Highlights

holehe removed; user-scanner added. holehe (last commit September 2024) has many broken modules and produces frequent false positives. It has been replaced by user-scanner, a 2-in-1 email and username OSINT suite with 195+ scan vectors, actively maintained in 2025/2026.

Three new tools added.

linkook: maps linked social accounts and associated emails from a single username across multiple platforms.
socialscan: queries registration endpoints directly for accurate email and username availability checks on 11 platforms.
PhoneInfoga: phone number intelligence gathering. Installed as a Go binary to /usr/local/bin/. The developer has declared the project stable but unmaintained; the binary remains fully functional.

v2.0.5-beta — 2026-04-08

Patch release cleaning up the .desktop template files.

Highlights

.desktop files now use an explicit placeholder. All 12 shortcut files previously contained /home/osint/ as a de facto placeholder. These paths have been replaced with __HOME__, making clear that these are templates, not live paths. The sed substitution in setup.sh has been updated to match. Behaviour at install time is unchanged.

v2.0.4-beta — 2026-04-04

Patch release focused on installation correctness and user experience.

Highlights

VirtualBox Guest Additions removed from installer. virtualbox-guest-utils and virtualbox-guest-x11 have been removed from the apt install list. The dpkg config file prompt on virtualbox-guest-x11 blocked non-interactive installation. Guest Additions must now be installed manually before running setup.sh. The README Requirements section documents this as a prerequisite.

Closing motto updated. The final banner motto has been changed from Si vis pacem, para bellum to Audi, vide, tace — a more fitting motto for an OSINT workstation.

v2.0.3-beta — 2026-04-04

Patch release focused on installation resilience. No new tools added.

Highlights

Resilient apt installation. The 31-package apt install block has been replaced with a per-package wrapper function. If any individual package is unavailable or fails, the script logs a warning, records the package name, and continues. A summary of all failed packages is printed at the end of the run, before the reboot prompt.

pip install fallbacks. The four venv-based tools (theHarvester, metagoofil, recon-ng, blackbird) now each have a || log_warn fallback on their pip install call. A broken requirements.txt or upstream dependency conflict no longer kills the rest of the installation.

Obsidian snap fallback added. The snap install --dangerous call for Obsidian previously had no error handling. It now logs a warning and continues if snap fails, consistent with the amass and cherrytree installs.

Known failure points documented. A comment block near the top of setup.sh lists six categories of expected failure with explanations: VirtualBox packages on non-VirtualBox hosts, snapd in restricted environments, torbrowser-launcher repository issues, network-dependent steps, Firefox auto-launch in headless sessions, and EyeWitness bundled pip dependencies.

v2.0.2-beta — 2026-04-04

Patch release fixing two package issues and translating all script messages to English.

Highlights

openshot corrected to openshot-qt. The openshot package does not exist on Ubuntu 24.04 Noble. The apt install block would abort immediately when this package was not found. The correct package name is openshot-qt.

zip added to dependencies. The Firefox customisation step uses zip -F to repair the profile archive, but zip was not listed as a dependency. On minimal Ubuntu installs where zip is not pre-installed this would cause a silent failure.

All script messages translated to English. User-facing messages, log output and inline comments were a mix of Italian and English. All text is now in English for consistency.

v2.0.1-beta — 2026-04-01

Patch release focused on robustness, portability, and Wayland compatibility. No new tools added.

Highlights

Any Linux username now works. The previous requirement to set the Linux username to osint has been removed. setup.sh now replaces the hardcoded /home/osint/ paths in the .desktop shortcut files with the real home directory at install time. Nothing else changes.

Wayland sessions are now supported. All 10 zenity-based tool launchers detect a Wayland session automatically and switch to the X11 backend via XWayland. No user configuration is required. The fix is a no-op on X11 sessions.

Firefox profile setup is now fully automatic. On a clean VM where Firefox has never been opened, setup.sh would silently skip the profile customisation step. The script now launches and closes Firefox automatically to create the default profile before applying the Argos template.

Installation log moved to ~/Downloads/. The log file is now written to ~/Downloads/argos_install_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.log instead of the home directory root.

Bug fixes

File	Issue	Fix
`domains.sh`	theHarvester progress bar was blank (stderr not piped to zenity)	Added `2>&1` before pipe
`usernames.sh`	`sherlock` and `maigret` relied on PATH from `.bashrc`	Changed to explicit `$HOME/.local/bin/` paths
`youtubedl.sh`	`yt-dlp` not found in `Terminal=false` launch context	Changed to `/usr/bin/yt-dlp`
`spiderfoot.sh`	`pgrep` not found in `Terminal=false` launch context	Changed to `/usr/bin/pgrep`
`ffmpeg_interact.sh`	`ffmpeg`/`ffplay` not found in `Terminal=false` launch context	Changed to explicit `/usr/bin/` paths via variables
All scripts	zenity dialogs invisible on Wayland	Added `GDK_BACKEND=x11` guard

v2.0.0-beta — 2026-03-31

Major rewrite targeting Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) and Ubuntu Budgie 24.04 LTS.

Breaking change: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and 20.04 LTS are no longer supported.

Highlights

Python tool isolation (PEP 668 compliance). Ubuntu 24.04 uses Python 3.12, which blocks system-wide pip install. All Python CLI tools now install via pipx (isolated environments in ~/.local/share/pipx/). Tools with complex dependencies (theHarvester, metagoofil, recon-ng, blackbird) use per-project venv directories under ~/Downloads/Programs/.

Abandoned tools removed. The following tools were removed because they are no longer maintained:

Removed	Replacement
youtube-dl	yt-dlp
Instalooter	Instaloader
Sublist3r	Amass
Photon	— (Katana/GoSpider planned)
Moriarty-Project	— (PhoneInfoga planned)
Elasticsearch-Crawler	Shodan CLI
Atom Editor	VSCodium

New tools added. yt-dlp, holehe, maigret, blackbird, VSCodium, Obsidian (version fetched dynamically from GitHub API).

setup.sh completely rewritten.

set -euo pipefail + trap ERR: script halts on any error and prints the line number
Structured logging with log_ok, log_warn, log_error, log_step
Root user check
Full output captured to a log file via tee
Dynamic Firefox profile detection (supports both snap and .deb installs)
/etc/apt/keyrings/ method for GPG keys (replaces deprecated apt-key add)

All hardcoded /home/osint/ paths removed from scripts. All files in scripts/ now use $HOME.

v1.x — 2022

Added Toutatis to instagram.sh
Renamed sherlock.sh to usernames.sh
Icon paths moved from /documents/ to /Pictures/
Renamed sherlock.desktop to usernames.desktop