The Dispatch | Expert | Scudo Hub

Eddie Honda

Member

Registered: 2023-08-27

Posts: 40

Online Modern Citroën Service Box Documentation Project

The other day (20th September 2026) on Reddit, user AkdM_ posted this to the r/Citroen sub.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Citroen/commen … mentation/

A few years ago Citroën dealers used an internal app called Service Box for every repair, which contained methods, parts catalogue with exploded views, labour times, technical bulletins. An offline copy of it ("DocBackup") shipped as a Windows install with a Tomcat server and an embedded Firebird database. Mine kept crashing, and nothing else reads that data, so I rebuilt it as plain files, available online for all. Nothing to install!

What's in it:

• 48 models, from AX, BX and XM to C3 C6, DS5 and Jumper III

• about 124k+ documents: repair methods with tightening torques and step-by-step procedures, parts catalogue with hotspot images, labour times, incident notes

• 108k+ illustrations

• French, English, German, Spanish and Italian, switchable on any document

• full-text search per vehicle, filtering by engine and body variant, like the original

How it works:

• The original app stored documents as XML with codes, and 24 language dictionaries. I export both from the database and render in the browser, so one copy of each document serves every language.

• Images were Blowfish-encrypted LZMA files (.7en); the key was recoverable from the install. They are re-encoded to AVIF: 4.5 GB down to 1.6 GB.

• Everything is static: no server, no database, no cookies. One GitHub Pages site for the viewer and one repository per vehicle for its data, to stay under the per-repo limits. About 6 GB in total.

• Anyone can see the analytics here. No personal data included, only anonymous metrics like page views, referrer links and basic browser stats. This is just a simple way for me to see if the project is interesting to people and worth keeping up.

• Anyone can clone a vehicle's repository and have the whole thing offline.

• The build pipeline itself (database export, image decryption, renderers, publishing) isn't published yet. It needs some cleanup first. I may release it later if there's interest.

Site: https://citroen-documentation-modern-backup.github.io/
Repositories: https://github.com/orgs/Citroen-Documen … positories

Happy to answer questions about the reverse engineering or the pipeline. If you have the same kind of dying dealer software for another brand, the approach transfers.

Note: this was all vibe coded with Claude Code (Fable 5.1 ftw). I'm a software engineer, so I knew where I needed to go and made the stack and architecture decisions myself (static hosting, one repo per vehicle, rendering the XML client-side with dictionaries). The AI wrote the code and did the grunt work of the reverse engineering. Happy to answer anything about that too.

Might be useful for easier working of the database offline. I'll have a play with it and see how to install and work it.

RegW

Member

From: Bristol

Registered: 2024-04-21

Posts: 369

Re: Online Modern Citroën Service Box Documentation Project

Interesting.
I got a copy of The Peugeot version a while back and tbh it's a bit if ball ache to use as it runs
on XP via VMware but eventually( did I say it's a PITA?)
I managed to extract and build a library of all the 2.0 HDI wiring diagrams which what I mainly wanted

Dispatch/Expert/Scudo vans don't use cable colour conventions, instead each cable has its own unique code printed on the sleeve.
When you have these, tracing cables for testing/repair/modding becomes so much easier.
It made bypassing the flakey factory remote central locking pretty easy when I changed it for
an aftermarket setup which was dead cheap but works surprisingly well.
Only 4-5 months in but the remote still works from about 40 meters away and well, it just works!.

The rest of it might be useful say for part numbers but I haven't had to run it for ages and would only do so reluctantly.

The Peugeot WSM is pretty chunky, around 20GB or so, probably because it covers so many models from the 90's to 2013
if the guy on Reddit can extract particular models and display info in useable non PITA format, best of luck to him.

Last edited by RegW (Today 00:11:24)

---

When all else fails, RTFM  - 2006 Expert 2.0 HDI/110

Eddie Honda

Member

Registered: 2023-08-27

Posts: 40

Re: Online Modern Citroën Service Box Documentation Project

Having a play with the online version: https://citroen-documentation-modern-ba … thub.io/#/

Found a bug in the front end already and filed it: Translation of recent documents.

There's a load of data files, but only Citroen ones. I presume I could extract some Peugeot ones as I might have a long lost copy somewhere and I have a 106 & 306.

It would seem that the front end works well enough and isn't laggy and there's not much to download if the interest is in one or two particular models. Useful also to call up maintenance procedures where available too. Not sure how long it will last given half of that has always been on the paid access.

A lot of catalogues work in a similar fashion. I've got a Jaguar EPC which someone wrote a front end for easy offline use. I'm running a Linux desktop here and it's a PITA to fire up Oracle VirtualBox / Windows XP/7 whatever to run some old software to view some exploded diagrams.