Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure the information is preserved in an archive for future researchers, historians, and the public. Web archivists typically employ Web crawlers for automated capture due to the massive scale of the Web. Ever-evolving Web standards require continuous evolution of archiving tools to keep up with the changes in Web technologies to ensure reliable and meaningful capture and replay of archived web pages.
- Introductions to web archiving concepts:
- What is a web archive? - A video from the UK Web Archive YouTube Channel
- Wikipedia's List of Web Archiving Initiatives
- Glossary of Archive-It and Web Archiving Terms
- The Web Archiving Lifecycle Model - The Web Archiving Lifecycle Model is an attempt to incorporate the technological and programmatic arms of the web archiving into a framework that will be relevant to any organization seeking to archive content from the web. Archive-It, the web archiving service from the Internet Archive, developed the model based on its work with memory institutions around the world.
- The WARC Standard:
- The warc-specifications community HTML version of the official specification and hub for new proposals.
- The offical ISO 28500 WARC specification homepage.
- For researchers using web archives:
These resources can help when working with individuals or organisations who publish on the web, and who want to make sure their site can be archived.
- Stanford Libraries' Archivability pages
- The Archive Ready tool, for estimating how likely a web page will be archived successfully.
This list of tools and software is intended to briefly describe some of the most important and widely-used tools related to web archiving. For more details, we recommend you refer to (and contribute to!) these excellent resources from other groups:
- ArchiveBox - A tool which maintains an additive archive from RSS feeds, bookmarks, and links using wget, chrome headless, and other methods (formerly
Bookmark Archiver). (In Development) - archivenow - A Python library to push web resources into on-demand web archives. (Stable)
- Brozzler - A distributed web crawler (爬虫) that uses a real browser (chrome or chromium) to fetch pages and embedded urls and to extract links. (Stable)
- Chronicler - Web browser with record and replay functionality. (In Development)
- Crawl - A simple web crawler in Golang. (Stable)
- crocoite - Crawl websites using headless Google Chrome/Chromium and save resources, static DOM snapshot and page screenshots to WARC files. (In Development)
- F(b)arc - A commandline tool and Python library for archiving data from Facebook using the Graph API. (Stable)
- freeze-dry - JavaScript library to turn page into static, self-contained HTML document; useful for browser extensions. (In Development)
- grab-site - The archivist's web crawler: WARC output, dashboard for all crawls, dynamic ignore patterns. (Stable)
- Heritrix - An open source, extensible, web-scale, archival quality web crawler. (Stable)
- Heritrix Walkthrough (In Development)
- html2warc - A simple script to convert offline data into a single WARC file. (Stable)
- HTTrack - An open source website copying utility. (Stable)
- monolith - CLI tool to save a web page as a single HTML file. (Stable)
- SingleFile - Browser extension for Firefox/Chrome and CLI tool to save a faithful copy of a complete page as a single HTML file. (Stable)
- SiteStory - A transactional archive that selectively captures and stores transactions that take place between a web client (browser) and a web server. (Stable)
- Social Feed Manager - Open source software that enables users to create social media collections from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo public APIs. (Stable)
- Squidwarc - An open source, high-fidelity, page interacting archival crawler that uses Chrome or Chrome Headless directly. (In Development)
- StormCrawler - A collection of resources for building low-latency, scalable web crawlers on Apache Storm. (Stable)
- twarc - A command line tool and Python library for archiving Twitter JSON data. (Stable)
- WARCreate - A Google Chrome extension for archiving an individual webpage or website to a WARC file. (Stable)
- Warcworker - An open source, dockerized, queued, high fidelity web archiver based on Squidwarc with a simple web GUI. (Stable)
- WAIL - A graphical user interface (GUI) atop multiple web archiving tools intended to be used as an easy way for anyone to preserve and replay web pages; Python, Electron. (Stable)
- Web2Warc - An easy-to-use and highly customizable crawler that enables anyone to create their own little Web archives (WARC/CDX). (Stable)
- WebMemex - Browser extension for Firefox and Chrome which lets you archive web pages you visit. (In Development)
- Webrecorder - Create high-fidelity, interactive recordings of any web site you browse. (Stable)
- Wget - An open source file retrieval utility that of version 1.14 supports writing warcs. (Stable)
- Wget-lua - Wget with Lua extension. (Stable)
- Wpull - A Wget-compatible (or remake/clone/replacement/alternative) web downloader and crawler. (Stable)
- ReplayWeb.Page - A browser-based, fully client-side replay engine for both local and remote WARC files.
- PyWb - A Python (2 and 3) implementation of web archival replay tools, sometimes also known as 'Wayback Machine'. (Stable)
- OpenWayback - The open source project aimed to develop Wayback Machine, the key software used by web archives worldwide to play back archived websites in the user's browser. (Stable)
- InterPlanetary Wayback (ipwb) - Web Archive (WARC) indexing and replay using IPFS.
- Reconstructive - Reconstructive is a ServiceWorker module for client-side reconstruction of composite mementos by rerouting resource requests to corresponding archived copies (JavaScript).
- Mink - A Google Chrome extension for querying Memento aggregators while browsing and integrating live-archived web navigation. (Stable)
- SecurityTrails - Web based archive for WHOIS and DNS records. REST API available free of charge.
- Tempas v1 - Temporal web archive search based on Delicious tags. (Stable)
- Tempas v2 - Temporal web archive search based on links and anchor texts extracted from the German web from 1996 to 2013 (results are not limited to German pages, e.g., Obama@2005-2009 in Tempas). (Stable)
- webarchive-discovery - WARC and ARC full-text indexing and discovery tools, with a number of associated tools capable of using the index shown below. (Stable)
- Shine - A prototype web archives exploration UI, developed with researchers as part of the Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities project. (Stable)
- SolrWayback - A prototype web archives exploration UI with integrated playback functionality for WARCs. (In Development)
- Warclight - A Project Blacklight based Rails engine that supports the discovery of web archives held in the WARC and ARC formats. (In Development)
- Wasp - A fully functional prototype of a personal web archive and search system. (In Development)
- Other possible options for builting a front-end are listed on in the
webarchive-discoverywiki, here.
- ArchiveTools - Collection of tools to extract and interact with WARC files (Python).
- har2warc - Convert HTTP Archive (HAR) -> Web Archive (WARC) format (Python).
- httpreserve.info - Service to return the status of a web page or save it to the Internet Archive. Returns JSON via browser or command line via CURL using GET (Golang Package). (Stable)
- HTTPreserve Workbench - Tool and API to describe the status of a web page encoded in a simple JSON output describing current status, and earliest and latest links on wayback.org. Save a web page to the Internet Archive. Audit lists of URIs and output a CSV with the data described above (Golang). (In Development)
- MementoMap - A Tool to Summarize Web Archive Holdings (Python). (In Development)
- MemGator - A Memento Aggregator CLI and Server (Golang). (Stable)
- node-cdxj - CDXJ file parser (Node.js). (Stable)
- OutbackCDX - RocksDB-based capture index (CDX) server supporting incremental updates and compression. Can be used as backend for OpenWayback, PyWb and Heritrix. (Stable)
- py-wasapi-client - Command line application to download crawls from WASAPI (Python). (Stable)
- The Archive Browser - The Archive Browser is a program that lets you browse the contents of archives, as well as extract them. It will let you open files from inside archives, and lets you preview them using Quick Look. WARC is supported (macOS only, Proprietary app).
- The Unarchiver - Program to extract the contents of many archive formats, inclusive of WARC, to a file system. Free variant of The Archive Browser (macOS only, Proprietary app).
- tikalinkextract - Extract hyperlinks as a seed for web archiving from folders of document types that can be parsed by Apache Tika (Golang, Apache Tika Server). (In Development)
- wasapi-downloader - Java command line application to download crawls from WASAPI. (Stable)
- WarcPartitioner - Partition (W)ARC Files by MIME Type and Year. (Stable)
- webarchive-indexing - Tools for bulk indexing of WARC/ARC files on Hadoop, EMR or local file system.
- wikiteam - Tools for downloading and preserving wikis. (Stable)
- HadoopConcatGz - A Splitable Hadoop InputFormat for Concatenated GZIP Files (and
*.warc.gz). (Stable) - jwarc - Reading and write WARC files with a typesafe API (Java).
- Jwat - Libraries and tools for reading/writing/validating WARC/ARC/GZIP files (Java). (Stable)
- node-warc - Parse WARC files or create WARC files using either Electron or chrome-remote-interface (Node.js). (Stable)
- Warcat - Tool and library for handling Web ARChive (WARC) files (Python). (Stable)
- warcio - Streaming WARC/ARC library for fast web archive IO (Python).
- warctools - Library to work with ARC and WARC files (Python).
- webarchive - Golang readers for ARC and WARC webarchive formats (Golang).
- ArchiveSpark - An Apache Spark framework (not only) for Web Archives that enables easy data processing, extraction as well as derivation. (Stable)
- Archives Unleashed Cloud - Archives Unleashed Cloud (AUK) is an web interface for analysing web archives. Currently, it can sync with Archive-It collections and extract hyperlink networks, full text, and other information from your collections. (Stable)
- Archives Unleashed Notebooks - Notebooks for working with web archives with the Archives Unleashed Toolkit, and derivatives generated by the Archives Unleashed Toolkit. (Stable)
- Archives Unleashed Toolkit - Archives Unleashed Toolkit (AUT) is an open-source platform for analyzing web archives with Apache Spark. (Stable)
- Tweet Archvies Unleashed Toolkit - An open-source toolkit for analyzing line-oriented JSON Twitter archives with Apache Spark. (In Development)
- Chrome Check My Links - Browser extension: a link checker with more options.
- Chrome link checker - Browser extension: basic link checker.
- Chrome link gopher - Browser extension: link harvester on a page.
- Chrome Open Multiple URLs - Browser extension: opens multiple URLs and also extracts URLs from text.
- Chrome Revolver - Browser extension: switches between browser tabs.
- FlameShot - Screen capture and annotation on Ubuntu.
- PlayOnLinux - For running Xenu and Notepad++ on Ubuntu.
- PlayOnMac - For running Xenu and Notepad++ on macOS.
- Windows Snipping Tool - Windows built-in for partial screen capture and annotation. On macOS you can use Command + Shift + 4 (keyboard shortcut for taking partial screen capture).
- WineBottler - For running Xenu and Notepad++ on macOS.
- xDoTool - Click automation on Ubuntu.
- Xenu - Desktop link checker for Windows.
- IIPC Blog
- Web Archiving Roundtable - Unofficial blog of the Web Archiving Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists maintained by the members of the Web Archiving Roundtable.
- The Web as History - An open-source book that provides a conceptual overview to web archiving research, as well as several case studies.
- WS-DL Blog - Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group blogs about various Web archining related topics, scholarly work, and academic trip reports.
- DSHR's Blog - David Rosenthal regularly reviews and summarizes work done in the Digital Preservation field.
- IIPC Slack - Ask @netpreserve for access.
- Archives Unleashed Slack - Fill out this request form for access to a researcher group of people working with web archives.
- Archivers Slack - Invite yourself to a multi-disciplinary effort for archiving projects run in affiliation with EDGI and Data Together.
- @NetPreserve - Official IIPC handle.
- #WebArchiving