browsertrix-crawler VS awesome-web-archiving

(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

https://github.com/iipc/awesome-web-archiving/blob/main/READ...

People have pasted this around, https://github.com/iipc/awesome-web-archiving Could probably do it with wget if you had enough time?

Maybe something on this list can help you https://github.com/iipc/awesome-web-archiving

Awesome Web Archiving has a longer list of tools and software

Not related to the OP topic or zim but I was looking into archiving my bookmarks and other content like documentation sites and wikis. I'll list some of the things I ended up using.

ArchiveBox[1]: Pretty much a self-hosted wayback machine. It can save websites as plain html, screenshot, text, and some other formats. I have my bookmarks archived in it and have a bookmarklet to easily add new websites to it. If you use the docker-compose you can enable a full-text search backend for an easy search setup.

WebRecorder[2]: A browser extension that creates WACZ archives directly in the browser capturing exactly what content you load. I use it on sites with annoying dynamic content that sites like wayback and ArchiveBox wouldn't be able to copy.

ReplayWeb[3]: An interface to browse archive types like WARC, WACZ, and HAR. The interface is just like browsing through your browser. It can be self-hosted as well for the full offline experience.

browsertrix-crawler[4]: A CLI tool to scrape websites and output to WACZ. Its super easy to run with Docker and I use it to scrape entire blogs and docs for offline use. It uses Chrome to load webpages and has some extra features like custom browser profiles, interactive login, and autoscroll/autoplay. I use the `--generateWACZ` parameter so I can use ReplayWeb to easily browse through the final output.

For bookmark and misc webpage archiving then ArchiveBox should be more than enough. Check out this repo for an amazing list of tools and resources https://github.com/iipc/awesome-web-archiving

[1] https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox