Replay And Inspect WARC Web Archives Before Investigation Or Migration With Pywb

Replay WARC-backed web archives locally so an agent can inspect historical pages, validate captures, and review preserved site behavior before migration or investigation work.

Prerequisites

Python 3, pip

Installation

Use the upstream install or setup path that matches your environment:

• pip install pywb
• git clone https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb
• To install from a locally cloned copy, install with pip install -e . or python setup.py install.

Requirements and caveats from upstream:

• pywb is a Python 3 web archiving toolkit for replaying web archives large and small as accurately as possible.
• Note: depending on your Python installation, you may have to use pip3 instead of pip.
• To run tests, we recommend installing pip install tox tox-current-env and then running tox --current-env to test in your current Python environment.

Basic usage or getting-started notes:

---

• On Linux-based systems, first verify that python3-dev is installed. If it is not, install it with your package manager. E.g. on a Debian-based system, use:

• sudo apt install python3-dev

• Source: https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb

• Extracted from upstream docs: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webrecorder/pywb/HEAD/README.rst

Documentation

• https://pywb.readthedocs.io/

Source

• Agent Skill Exchange