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.
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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 on openSUSE Leap 15.x and Tumbleweed.
You need first add the snappy repository from the terminal. Leap 15.5 users, for example, can do this with the following command:
sudo zypper addrepo --refresh https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/system:/snappy/openSUSE_Leap_15.5 snappy
Swap out openSUSE_Leap_15.5 for openSUSE_Leap_15.4 or openSUSE_Tumbleweed if you’re using a different version of openSUSE.
With the repository added, import its GPG key:
sudo zypper --gpg-auto-import-keys refresh
Finally, upgrade the package cache to include the new snappy repository:
sudo zypper dup --from snappy
Snap can now be installed with the following:
sudo zypper install snapd
You then need to either reboot, logout/login or source /etc/profile to have /snap/bin added to PATH.
Additionally, enable and start both the snapd and the snapd.apparmor services with the following commands:
sudo systemctl enable --now snapd
sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.apparmor
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.