browsertrix-crawler VS zim-tools

(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

It looks like Kiwix uses the ZIM file format, which appears to have diffing support [0] (see zimdiff and zimpatch). That said, it doesn't look like Kiwix actually publishes those diffs.

[0] https://github.com/openzim/zim-tools/tree/master/src

One problem that remains is to bring the access to insight webpage to the ".zim" format that the kiwix app can process. Here it seems the only way to do that is a tool called "zimwriterfs" that can be found in another opensource project that defines the basis of the offline reader format and is used by kiwix I believe. https://github.com/openzim/zim-tools ...this was no problem for me, as the tool can be accessed easily from standard linux distributions like ubuntu. Creating the .zim file from the unzipped access to insight offline version is a single command line, after preparing a little icon that will be used for the site in kiwix. There seems to be no windows version of that tool available though...

More info at https://github.com/openzim/zim-tools