Personal WayBack Machine

pwbm - Personal WayBack Machine

The goal of pwbm is to make an easy to use appliance which can be fed URLs which it scrapes periodically. The content is saved in a similar manner to the popular "Wayback machine". However as this is a 'personal' wayback machine, you control the URLs which are scanned, and when. The archive is held locally and can be easily managed.

Note: Unlike the "real" wayback machine, pwbm does not seek to crawl the entire web, nor does it spider entire websites. It only archives specific URLs given to it. This is by design.

Installation

pwbm is available as a snap in the Snap Store. The snap bundles everything needed to function, including monolith. Installation on Linux is as follows:

snap install pwbm

Note: due to the unfinished nature of pwbm, it's currently only available in the edge channel.

Alternatively just clone the repo and run the shell script. You'll also need monolith.

Usage

Adding URLs

Simply run pwbm with a URL you'd like it to archive. This does not currently initiate a snapshot of that page.

pwbm https://ubuntu.com/

Gathering page snapshots

Run pwbm to start a snapshot of every page.

pwbm

Results are stored in $SNAPUSERCOMMON/archive if instaled from a snap, or ./archive if run outside of a snap.

How it works

It's super basic. pwbm just iterates through a list of URLs in a file, spawning monolith and saving the results in a datestamped file in a folder specific to the host and path.

``

$ tree ~/snap/pwbm/common/archive/
/home/alan/snap/pwbm/common/archive/
└── ubuntu.com

 └── 2020-01-18T13:32:39+00:00-index.html

1 directory, 1 file

`

Viewing results

Browse the files in the archive/ folder and open them in a browse to view.

A convenience webserver has been added. It can be launched as follows, and presents the archive directory on port 8076.

pwbm.server

Visit http://localhost:8076/` to view the snapshots.