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 $SNAP_USER_COMMON/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.
Thank you for your report. Information you provided will help us investigate further.
There was an error while sending your report. Please try again later.
You are about to open
Do you wish to proceed?
Snaps are applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all popular Linux distributions from a single build. They update automatically and roll back gracefully.
Snaps are discoverable and installable from the Snap Store, an app store with an audience of millions.
Snap can be installed from the command line. Open the Konsole terminal and enter the following:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapd
To install Personal WayBack Machine, simply use the following command:
sudo snap install pwbm
Browse and find snaps from the convenience of your desktop using the snap store snap.
Interested to find out more about snaps? Want to publish your own application? Visit snapcraft.io now.