notes

Developing with the Internet Archive

Documentation

• Internet Archive Developer Portal: IA developer resources; mostly oriented towards collections, not the Wayback Machine.
• File formats
  • WARC and CDX specifications
  • An introduction to WARC
• Wayback Machine APIs
  • API docs (2013)
  • WARC
    • WARC and ARC files seem to be stored at https://archive.org/download/<filename>, where the filename is from a CDX query, as indicated in Archive-It documentation. They give a 403 error, though.
  • CDX (Capture Index)
    • Wayback CDX Server API [docs source]
    • Differences between v1 and v2
    • Wayback Machine CDX image shards are privately stored in the waybackcdx collection.
    • sortkey is in SURT form (Sort-friendly URI Reordering Transform), which is implemented in the webarchive-commons org.archive.url package and the internetarchive/surt Python port.
  • Memento
    • Fully compliant with the Memento protocol
    • Examples (2013)
  • Availability JSON
  • Save Page Now
    • Limits requests to 15 per minute, or it will block your IP for 5 minutes (as of 2019)
    • Save Page Now changelog
  • URL formats
    • Advanced search
    • Wikipedia documentation

Tools

• Lists
  • IIPC’s Awesome Web Archiving
  • Archive Team’s list of tools to restore a site from the Wayback Machine
• Tools
  • edgi-govdata-archiving/wayback [docs]: Python API to the Wayback Machine.
  • ArchiveBox: Self-hosted archival tool.
  • OutbackCDX: RocksDB-based CDX server for web archives, that’s used by national libraries with millions of records. Works with OpenWayback (XML) and pywb (JSON) CDX protocols.
  • IA cdx-summary: Python CLI to summarize CDX files.
  • IIPC jwarc: WARC parser and writer.
  • IIPC urlcanon: Python URL parser, browser-style URL canonicalizer, and SSURT (improved SURT).
• Source of IA projects:
  • IA Heritrix [API docs] [Wikipedia]: IA’s web crawler.
  • webrecorder/pywb [docs]: Provides the basic functionality of a Wayback Machine.
  • IIPC OpenWayback [source wiki]: Project to build the Wayback Machine (no longer under development and recommends pywb).
• Rust crates
  • wayback-rs [source]: Downloader using the CDX v1 API. Saves pages with the Save Page Now API as an authenticated user. Guesses the body of a redirect and checks it against the digest, to reduce API calls. Handles retries and redirects.
  • wayback-urls [source]: URL builder for Wayback Machine CDX v2 (timemap) API.
  • wayback-mirror [source]: Simple downloader for Wayback Machine CDX v1 API.
  • wayback-archiver [source]: CLI that saves pages with the Save Page Now API. Has good API status code handling.
  • warc [source]: Reader and writer for WARC files.
  • warc_nom_parser [source]: Small reader for WARC files using nom.
  • rust_warc [source]: Small reader for WARC files.

Other archives

• ArchiveTeam
  • icka: IRCCloud keep-alive, for ArchiveTeam IRC channels.
• Archive-It
  • Web Archiving Systems API (WASAPI): Querying and downloading WARCs from Archive-It.
  • grab-site: Web crawler to recursively crawl a site interactively with a dashboard from a URL and write WARCs, using a fork of wpull.
  • Wpull: Wget-compatible (remake) web crawler and downloader.
• Time Travel: Find mementos in IA, Archive-It, the British Library, archive.today, GitHub, and more.

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