browsertrix-crawler VS ArchiveBox

(Disclaimer: I work at Webrecorder)

Our automated crawler browsertrix-crawler (https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler) uses Puppeteer to run browsers that we archive in by loading pages, running behaviors such as auto-scroll, and then record the request/response traffic. We have some custom behavior for some social media and video sites to make sure that content is appropriate captured. It is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game as we have to continue to update these behaviors as sites change, but for the most part it works pretty well.

The trickier part is in replaying the archived websites, as a certain amount of re-writing has to happen in order to make sure the HTML and JS are working with archived assets rather than the live web. One implementation of this is replayweb.page (https://github.com/webrecorder/replayweb.page), which does all of the rewriting client-side in the browser. This sets you interact with archived websites in WARC or WACZ format as if interacting with the original site.

I use browsertrix-crawler[0] for crawling and it does well on JS heavy sites since it uses a real browser to request pages. Even has options to load browser profiles so you can crawl while being authenticated on sites.

[0] https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler

I have started using the tools from https://webrecorder.net like Browsertrix Crawler and they have been working great. The web archive format is open source and very portable. The crawler even crawls and saves YouTube videos embedded on pages which is awesome.

This looks like a good candidate for https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler.

I just learned about this organization, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO): https://www.sucho.org/

They seem to be using various tools, like Browsertrix: https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler

It sounds promising for interactive sites:

> Support for custom browser behaviors, using Browsertix Behaviors including autoscroll, video autoplay and site-specific behaviors

Browsertrix links to https://replayweb.page/ for a way to view an archived site.

If you need more advanced recursive spider/crawling ability beyond --depth=1, check out Browsertrix, Photon, or Scrapy and pipe the outputted URLs into ArchiveBox.

I recommend this: https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler

Two projects I greatly appreciate, allowing me to easily archive my bandcamp and GOG purchases (after the initial setup anyways):

https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader

https://github.com/Kalanyr/gogrepoc

And I recently learned about archivebox, which I think is going to be a fast favorite and finally let me clear out my mess of tabs/bookmarks: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox

If you really want to save the content for yourself, use something like https://archivebox.io/

I've been running a local instance for a few years now and download/save tech articles all time. I can search and find them as needed.

API is coming soon (relatively, it's still a one-man project)! Stay tuned https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/issues/496

I have an event-sourcing refactor in progress now to allow us to pluginize functionality like the API (similar to Home Assistant with a plugin app sotre), it will take a month or two. Next up is the REST API using the new plugin system.

I guess your best chance is to use something like https://archivebox.io/.

Yeah this is a cool project but it was discussed 2 days ago.

As mentioned by the maintainer there, they even maintain a list of alternatives, very classy:

https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-...