wayback-archive 1.5.0

Download complete websites from the Wayback Machine for offline viewing.

Wayback-Archive is a Python tool that downloads archived websites from the Wayback Machine and reconstructs them for fully functional offline viewing. It preserves all assets -- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and fonts -- rewrites URLs to relative paths, and cleans up Wayback Machine artifacts so the result looks like the original site. Unlike wget --mirror or httrack, it understands Wayback Machine URLs.

Features

• Downloads HTML, CSS, JS, images, fonts and every linked asset, following links in HTML, CSS and JS.
• Rewrites every link to a relative path so the copy works from a local server.
• Tries up to three other Wayback Machine timestamps (a day either side and a week earlier) when a resource returns 404.
• Replaces a capture that is an archived error or a Cloudflare challenge page with the nearest good capture.
• Saves Google Fonts locally, and removes corrupted fonts (HTML error pages served as fonts).
• Falls back to a CDN for critical libraries such as jQuery.
• Keeps icon groups, button links and cookie consent popups working.
• Optional HTML, JS, CSS and image minification, and removal of trackers, ads and external iframes.
• Configured with environment variables or a .env file.

Quick start

pip install wayback-archive
WAYBACK_URL="https://web.archive.org/web/20250417203037/http://example.com/" wayback-archive
cd output && python3 -m http.server 8000   # then open http://localhost:8000

Needs Python 3.10 or newer. The source install and every setting are in Getting started.

Documentation

The documentation is published as a site at geiserx.github.io/Wayback-Archive. The same pages on GitHub:

• Getting started: install from PyPI or from source, and the first run
• Configuration: every environment variable
• Usage: macOS, Linux and Windows examples
• Features: the full list and a comparison with wget and httrack
• How it works: the crawl steps, project layout and dependencies
• Troubleshooting, including the font loading notes
• Development: tests and contributing
• Related projects: the other Wayback tools
• Releases

Related projects

Wayback-Diff, Way-CMS, web-mirror, media-download, n8n-nodes-way-cms (archived). Descriptions are in Related projects.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later