browsertrix-crawler VS monolith

(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

Cool, but consider monolith for this instead (https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith)

- Outputs a single .html file, consumable with any web browser on any platform

- Rust, so, you know, +1 HN (;D)

Monolith is a CLI tool for saving complete web pages as a single HTML file.

I have never used monolith to say with any certainty, but two things in your description are worth highlighting between the goals of WARC versus the umpteen bazillion "save this one page I'm looking at as a single file" type projects:

1. WARC is designed, as a goal, to archive the request-response handshake. It does not get into the business of trying to make it easy for a browser to subsequently display that content, since that's a browser's problem

2. Using your cited project specifically, observe the number of "well, save it but ..." options <https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith#options> which is in stark contrast to the archiving goals I just spoke about. It's not a good snapshot of history if the server responded with `content-type: text/html;charset=iso-8859-1` back in the 90s but "modern tools" want everything to be UTF-8 so we'll just convert it, shall we? Bah, I don't like JavaScript, so we'll just toss that out, shall we? And so on

For 100% clarity: monolith, and similar, may work fantastic for any individual's workflow, and I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum; but I do want to highlight that all things being equal it should always be possible to derive monolith files from warc files because the warc files are (or at least have the goal of) perfect fidelity of what the exchange was. I would guess only pcap files would be of higher fidelity, but also a lot more extraneous or potentially privacy violating details

console $ nix-init default.nix -u https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith [...] (press enter to select the defaults) $ nix-build -E "(import { }).callPackage ./. { }" [...] $ result/bin/monilith --version monolith 2.7.0

For example, here’s a command-line tool to save webpages as HTML files: https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith

monolith: Convert any webpage into a single HTML file with all assets inlined.

There is also a program (monolith: https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith) that does the same

besides wget, for single pages I use monolith https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith