Wayback Restorator

Turn a Wayback Machine capture into a portable static website ZIP. Restore archived pages and assets from your terminal or a local dashboard, with a report of missing captures and resumable jobs.

Install

Requires Python 3.11 or newer:

pipx install wayback-restorator
# or
uv tool install wayback-restorator

Or run the Docker image without installing Python:

mkdir -p data
docker run --rm -it --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" -v "$PWD/data:/app/data" \
  registry.gitlab.com/restorator-labs/wayback-restorator restore '<replay URL>'

Usage

Web dashboard

wayback-restorator web

Open localhost:8080, paste an exact Wayback replay URL, and download the finished ZIP. The dashboard runs on your machine, bound to 127.0.0.1 by default.

Restore from the terminal

wayback-restorator restore 'https://web.archive.org/web/20260925084419/https://example.com/'

Follow the progress in your terminal. Completed jobs print the archive and report paths in data/output/jobs/<job-id>/. Run wayback-restorator restore --help for all options.

What it does

• Finds archived pages and assets using Wayback CDX, falling back to exact replay when necessary, and downloads them with bounded concurrency and retries.
• Rewrites HTML and CSS references to local paths and records missing captures instead of silently treating them as restored.
• Saves resumable crawl state and publishes a validated static ZIP. Static or server-rendered sites work best; client-rendered routes, forms, authenticated pages, and resources never archived may be incomplete.

Documentation

Read the full documentation at docs.waybackrestorator.dev:

Project

Wayback Restorator is independent open-source software and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Internet Archive.

Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3; see LICENSE. Changes are recorded in releases.