WAIL

Web Archiving Integration Layer

One-Click User Instigated Preservation

What Is It?

Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) is a graphical user interface (GUI) atop multiple web archiving tools intended to be used as an easy way for anyone to preserve and replay web pages.

Tools included and accessible through the GUI are Heritrix 3.1.2, Wayback 1.7, and warc-proxy. Support packages include Apache Tomcat, phantomjs and pyinstaller.

WAIL is written mostly in Python and a small amount of JavaScript.

Screenshots

Screenshot depicting the 'basic' interface of WAIL

Screenshot depicting the 'advanced' interface of WAIL

Basic Use Case

Screenshot depicting cnn.com being loaded into the basic WAIL interface.

"Archive Now!" button sets up crawl, initiates crawl and puts archive file in correct location to be indexed.

Wayback consumption can be checked with "Check Archive Status" button.

Wayback columned interface showing that an archived instance has been created from cnn.com.

Once indexed, "View Archive" buttons shows all archives for URL in local Wayback.

Selecting the date in local Wayback displays the preserved webpage.

Usage

Mac OS X
1. Download and mount the DMG
2. Drag the WAIL directory from the disk image to the /Applications directory (thus creating /Applications/WAIL)
3. Launch WAIL.app
Windows (7+)
1. Download and unzip the file
2. Drag the WAIL folder to your C:/ drive (thus creating C:/WAIL/)
3. Launch WAIL.exe

Download (changes)

License

All tools aggregated in this software maintain their respective licenses. WAIL is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. WAIL's source is available on GitHub.

Send all questions, comments, and bug reports to Mat Kelly.