waybackpy

You can install waybackpy using pip, conda, or by pulling directly from the GitHub repository.

Using pip (Recommended):

pip install waybackpy -U

Using conda (Recommended):

conda install -c conda-forge waybackpy

Directly from GitHub (Not recommended):

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

The waybackpy CLI allows you to perform various operations on a given URL, such as retrieving the oldest/newest archives, saving a page to the Wayback Machine, or querying the CDX API for historical snapshots.

Basic usage requires providing a URL with the -u or --url flag. If no specific action flag is provided, the CLI will return a NoCommandFound error.

To see all available commands and flags, run:

waybackpy --help

The WaybackMachineSaveAPI (also known as the Save API or SavePageNow) allows you to trigger the Wayback Machine to save a specific URL.

When initializing, you must provide the url and a user_agent.

Key attributes:

• save(): Triggers the save operation and returns the archive URL.
• cached_save: A boolean indicating if the page was already cached.
• timestamp(): Returns a datetime.datetime object of the save event.

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()
print(save_api.timestamp())

The WaybackMachineAvailabilityAPI (Availability API) provides methods to check if a URL has been archived.

Note: It is recommended to use WaybackMachineCDXServerAPI instead of this class for better performance. However, WaybackMachineAvailabilityAPI.newest() may return results more recent than the CDX server API.

Methods:

• oldest(): Returns the URL of the oldest archive.
• newest(): Returns the URL of the newest archive.
• near(year=..., month=..., day=..., hour=...): Returns the URL of the archive closest to the specified time.

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)
print(availability_api.newest())

Use the --save (-s) flag to trigger the SavePageNow API, which archives the current state of the URL.

Additional options:

• --headers (-h): If passed, the CLI will also print the headers data returned by the SavePageNow API.

Example:

waybackpy --url "https://example.com" --save

You can quickly find the earliest or most recent version of a URL using the following flags:

• --oldest (-o): Retrieve the oldest archive of the URL.
• --newest (-n): Retrieve the newest archive of the URL.

Example to get the oldest archive:

waybackpy --url "https://example.com" --oldest

Use the --near (-N) flag along with time-based arguments to find the snapshot closest to a specific point in time. Supported time arguments are:

• --year (-Y): 1994-9999
• --month (-M): 1-12
• --day (-D): 1-31
• --hour (-H): 0-24
• --minute (--MIN): 0-60

Example:

waybackpy --url "https://example.com" --near --year 2010 --month 5 --day 20

Use the --known-urls (-ku) flag to list all URLs known to the Wayback Machine for a given domain using the CDX API.

Options:

• --subdomain (-sub): Include known URLs for subdomains.
• --file (-f): Instead of printing to stdout, save the discovered URLs into a text file in the current working directory. The filename follows the pattern {domain}-urls-{random_id}.txt.

Example to save subdomains to a file:

waybackpy --url "https://example.com" --known-urls --subdomain --file

By default, waybackpy uses a default user agent. You can override this for all commands using the --user-agent (-ua) or --user_agent flag.

waybackpy --url "https://example.com" --user-agent "MyCustomAgent/1.0"