I thought I’d add a few notes here, as there’s a few ways you can use Webrecorder and related tools.
First, Webrecorder supports two distinct modes:
- Native recording mode — http/s traffic goes to through the browser and is rewritten to point to the Webrecorder server (This is the default).
- Remote browser mode — Webrecorder launches a browser in Docker container, and streams the screen to your browser (using noVNC). The traffic is either recorded or replayed depending on the mode, but the operation is the same (we call this ‘symmetrical archiving’) This gives you a recording proxy w/o having to configure your browser or install any plugins.
You can choose this mode by clicking the dropdown to choose a browser (currently Chrome and FF) This is essentially a remote browser configured via HTTP/S proxy, and allows us to record things like Flash and even Java applets, and other technologies that may become obsolete.
- We also have a desktop player app, Webrecorder Player, available for download from: https://github.com/webrecorder/webrecorderplayer-electron/re...
This is an app that plays back WARCs files (created by Webrecorder and elsewhere), and allows browsing any WARC file offline.
Another way to create a web archive (for developers): You can use the devtools in the browser to export HAR files, and Webrecorder and Webrecorder Player will convert them on the fly and play them back. Unfortunately, this option is sort of limited for developers, but you can actually create a fairly good archive locally using HAR export (available in Chrome and Firefox at least). The conversion is done using this tool: https://github.com/webrecorder/har2warc
- If you use webrecorder.io, you can register for an account or use it anonymously. If you register for an account, we provide 5GB storage and you have a permanent url for your archive. You can also upload existing WARCs (or HARs)
- You can also run Webrecorder on your own! The main codebase is at: https://github.com/webrecorder/webrecorder and the remote browser system is actually a separate component and was first used for oldweb.today and lives at https://github.com/oldweb-today
Finally, the core replay/recording tech is actually a separate component, an advanced ‘wayback machine’ being developed in https://github.com/ikreymer/pywb
There’s a lot of different components here, and we would definitely appreciate help to any and all parts of the stack if anyone is interested! All our work is open-source and we are a non-profit, so any help is appreciated.