browsertrix-crawler VS grab-site

(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

The format you want is WARC. Even the Library of Congress uses it. There are many many WARC scrapers. I'd look at what the Internet Archive recommends. A quick search turned up this from the Archive Team and Jason Scott https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Who_We_Are) but I found that in less than 15 seconds of searching so do your own diligence.

You can use grab-site with --no-offsite-links and --igsets=mediawiki.

Does the forum provide real-time notification for new posts? Like maybe a RSS feed, or a 'New' section? If so, some scripting around grab-site or httrack could grab them quickly.

After a lot of searching for a similar topic, this is a tool I found which works pretty well: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site

Crawling is of course the other option. I've seen https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site in the wiki, but I'm unsure how to host the resulting .warc archives.

It's a completely different tool, but I like using grab-site https://github.com/archiveteam/grab-site . Try --wpull-args=--span-hosts='' or something to make it mirror all subdomains. It outputs in WARC format which can be read with a site like https://replayweb.page.

Thusly, as a bit of a statement, here's your "I will do it myself even if I have to bash my head against the wall" collection of the Developer Story on 10-20 top users. I know there are some blogs on old web design, perhaps it might be worth their while as a memento of an era bygone. And as for myself, I am looking into setting up a dedicated server for either grab-site or ArchiveBox. Possibly both!