PyWb 0.1 Beta

pywb is a Python re-implementation of the Wayback Machine software.

The goal is to provide a brand new, clean implementation of Wayback.

This involves playing back archival web content (usually in WARC or ARC files) as best or accurately as possible, in straightforward by highly customizable way.

It should be easy to deploy and hack!

Wayback Machine

A typical Wayback Machine serves archival content in the following form:

http://<host>/<collection>/<timestamp>/<original url>

Ex: The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has urls of the form:

http://web.archive.org/web/20131015120316/http://archive.org/

A listing of archived content, often in calendar form, is available when a * is used instead of timestamp.

pywb uses this interface as a starting point.

Requirements

pywb currently works best with 2.7.x It should run in a standard WSGI container, although currently tested primarily with uWSGI 1.9 and 2.0

Support for other versions of Python 3 is planned.

Installation

pywb comes with sample archived content, also used for unit testing the app.

The data can be found in sample_archive and contains warc and cdx files. The sample archive contains recent captures from http://example.com and http://iana.org

To start a pywb with sample data

1. Clone this repo

2. Install with python setup.py install

3. Run pywb by via script run.sh (script currently assumes a default python and uwsgi install, feel free to edit as needed)

4. Test pywb in your browser! (pywb is set to run on port 8080 by default.)

If everything worked, the following pages should be loading (served from sample_archive dir):

Original Url	Latest Capture	List of All Captures
http://example.com	http://localhost:8080/pywb/example.com	http://localhost:8080/pywb/*/example.com
http://iana.org	http://localhost:8080/pywb/iana.org	http://localhost:8080/pywb/*/iana.org

Automated Tests

Currently pywb consists of numerous doctests against the sample archive. Additional testing is in the works.

The current set of tests can be run with Nose:

nosetests --with-doctest

Sample Setup

pywb is configurable via yaml.

The simplest config.yaml is roughly as follows:

routes:
    - name: pywb

     index_paths:
          - ./sample_archive/cdx/

     archive_paths:
          - ./sample_archive/warcs/

     head_insert_html_template: ./ui/head_insert.html

     calendar_html_template: ./ui/query.html


hostpaths: ['http://localhost:8080/']

The optional ui elements, the query/calendar and header insert are specifyable via html/Jinja2 templates.

(Refer to full version of config.yaml for additional documentation)

For more advanced use, the pywb init path can be customized further:

• The PYWB_CONFIG env can be used to set a different yaml file.

• The PYWB_CONFIG_MODULE env variable can be used to set a different init module, for implementing a custom init

(or for extensions not yet supported via yaml)

See run.sh for more details

Running with Existing CDX/WARCs

If you have existing .warc/.arc and .cdx files, you can adjust the index_paths and archive_paths to point to the location of those files.

SURT

By default, pywb expects the cdx files to be Sort-Friendly-Url-Transform (SURT) ordering. This is an ordering that transforms: example.com -> com,example)/ to faciliate better search. It is recommended for future indexing, but is not required.

Non-SURT ordered cdx indexs will work as well, but be sure to specify:

surt_ordered: False in the config.yaml

Creating CDX from WARCs

If you have warc files without cdxs, the following steps can be taken to create the indexs.

cdx indexs are sorted plain text files indexing the contents of archival records in one or more WARC/ARC files.

(The cdx_writer tool creates SURT ordered keys by default)

pywb does not currently generate indexs automatically, but this may be added in the future.

For production purposes, it is recommended that the cdx indexs be generated ahead of time.

** Note: these recommendations are subject to change as the external libraries are being cleaned up **

The directions are for running in a shell:

1. Clone https://bitbucket.org/rajbot/warc-tools

2. Clone https://github.com/internetarchive/CDX-Writer to get cdx_writer.py

3. Copy cdx_writer.py from CDX_Writer into warctools/hanzo in warctools

4. Ensure sort order set to byte-order export LC_ALL=C to ensure proper sorting.

5. From the directory of the warc(s), run <FULL PATH>/warctools/hanzo/cdx_writer mypath/warcs/mywarc.gz | sort > mypath/cdx/mywarc.cdx

   This will create a sorted mywarc.cdx for mywarc.gz. Then point pywb to the mypath/warcs and mypath/cdx directories in the yaml config.

6. pywb sort merges all specified cdx files on the fly. However, if dealing with larger number of small cdxs, there will be performance benefit

   from sort-merging them into a larger cdx file before running pywb. This is recommended for production.

   An example sort merge post process can be done as follows:

   export LC_ALL=C
   sort -m mypath/cdx/*.cdx | sort -c > mypath/merged_cdx/merge_1.cdx
   

   (The merged cdx will start with several CDX headers due to the merge. These headers indicate cdx format and should be all the same! They are always first and pywb ignores them)

   In the yaml config, set index_paths to point to mypath/merged_cdx/merged_1.cdx

Additional Documentation

• For additional/up-to-date configuration details, consult the current config.yaml

• The wiki will have additional technical documentation about various aspects of pywb

Contributions

You are encouraged to fork and contribute to this project to improve web archiving replay

Please take a look at list of current issues and feel free to open new ones