A Python package & CLI tool that interfaces with the Wayback Machine API

---

⭐️ Introduction

Waybackpy is a Python package and a CLI tool that interfaces with the Wayback Machine API.

Wayback Machine has 3 client side APIs.

• Save API
• Availability API
• CDX API

These three APIs can be accessed via the waybackpy either by importing it in a script or from the CLI.

🏗 Installation

Using pip, from PyPI (recommended):

pip install waybackpy

Install directly from this git repository (NOT recommended):

pip install git+https://github.com/akamhy/waybackpy.git

🐳 Docker Image

Docker Hub : https://hub.docker.com/r/secsi/waybackpy

Docker image is automatically updated on every release by Regulary and Automatically Updated Docker Images (RAUDI).

RAUDI is a tool by SecSI (https://secsi.io), an Italian cybersecurity startup.

🚀 Usage

As a Python package

Save API aka SavePageNow

>>> from waybackpy import WaybackMachineSaveAPI
>>> url = "https://github.com"
>>> user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"
>>>
>>> save_api = WaybackMachineSaveAPI(url, user_agent)
>>> save_api.save()
https://web.archive.org/web/20220118125249/https://github.com/
>>> save_api.cached_save
False
>>> save_api.timestamp()
datetime.datetime(2022, 1, 18, 12, 52, 49)

Availability API

>>> from waybackpy import WaybackMachineAvailabilityAPI
>>>
>>> url = "https://google.com"
>>> user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"
>>>
>>> availability_api = WaybackMachineAvailabilityAPI(url, user_agent)
>>>
>>> availability_api.oldest()
https://web.archive.org/web/19981111184551/http://google.com:80/
>>>
>>> availability_api.newest()
https://web.archive.org/web/20220118150444/https://www.google.com/
>>>
>>> availability_api.near(year=2010, month=10, day=10, hour=10)
https://web.archive.org/web/20101010101708/http://www.google.com/

CDX API aka CDXServerAPI

>>> from waybackpy import WaybackMachineCDXServerAPI
>>> url = "https://pypi.org"
>>> user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"
>>> cdx = WaybackMachineCDXServerAPI(url, user_agent, start_timestamp=2016, end_timestamp=2017)
>>> for item in cdx.snapshots():
...     print(item.archive_url)
...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160110011047/http://pypi.org/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160305104847/http://pypi.org/
.
. # URLS REDACTED FOR READABILITY
.
https://web.archive.org/web/20171127171549/https://pypi.org/
https://web.archive.org/web/20171206002737/http://pypi.org:80/

Documentation is at https://github.com/akamhy/waybackpy/wiki/Python-package-docs.

As a CLI tool

Saving a webpage:

waybackpy --save --url "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media" --user_agent "my-unique-user-agent"

Archive URL:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220121193801/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Cached save:
False

Retriving the oldest archive and also printing the JSON response of the availability API:

waybackpy --oldest --json --url "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanoid" --user_agent "my-unique-user-agent"

Archive URL:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040415020811/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Humanoid
JSON response:
{"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanoid", "archived_snapshots": {"closest": {"status": "200", "available": true, "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20040415020811/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/Humanoid", "timestamp": "20040415020811"}}, "timestamp": "199401212126"}

Archive close to a time, minute level precision is supported:

waybackpy --url google.com --user_agent "my-unique-user-agent" --near --year 2008 --month 8 --day 8

Archive URL:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080808014003/http://www.google.com:80/

CLI documentation is at https://github.com/akamhy/waybackpy/wiki/CLI-docs.

🛡 License

Copyright (c) 2020-2022 Akash Mahanty Et al.

Released under the MIT License. See license for details.