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ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives

docs.sweeting.me

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ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives

#1
We've been pushing really hard over the last 6mo to develop this release. I'd love to hear feedback from people who've worked on big plugin systems in the past, or anyone who's tried our betas!

ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives
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Re: ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives

#4
I don't know how anyone manages to use archivebox. I've tried it twice in the last 3 years and its site compatibility is bad, it quietly leaks everything you archive to archive.org by default, and whenever it fails on a download it stops archiving anything even after deleting and resubmitting all the jobs.

I'm sure it works for some people, but not me.

Re: ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives

#5
https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site might be helpful. I'm a fan of the ability to create WARC archives from a target, uploard the WARC files to object storage (whether that is IA, S3, Backblaze B2, etc), and then keep them in cold storage or serve them up via HTTPS or a torrent (mutable, preferred). The Internet Archive serves a torrent file for every item they host; one can do the same with WARC archives to enable a distributed archive. CDX indexes can be used for rapidly querying the underlying WARC archives.

You might support cryptographically signing WARC archives; Wayback is particular about archive provenance and integrity, for example.

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0005... ("CDX Internet Archive Index File")

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0002... ("WARC, Web ARChive file format")

https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayba... ("Wayback CDX Server API - BETA")

Re: ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives

#7

I don't know how anyone manages to use archivebox. I've tried it twice in the last 3 years and its site compatibility is bad, it quietly leaks everything you archive to archive.org by default, and whenever it fails on a download it stops archiving anything even after deleting and resubmitting all the jobs. I'm sure it works for some people, but not me.

These are legitimate gripes that have plagued specific past releases, I hear your frustration. Please keep in mind this was a solo effort of a single developer, only worked on in my spare time over the last 7 years (up until very recently).

The new v0.8 adds a BG queue specifically to deal with the issue of stalling when some sites fail. There was a system to do this in the past, but it was imperfect and mostly optimized for the docker setup where a scheduler is running `archivebox update` every few hours to retry failed URLs.

Site compability is much improved with the new BETA, but it's a perpetual cat and mouse game to fix specific sites, which is why we think the new plugin system is the way forward. It's just not sustainable for a single company (really just me right now) to maintain hundreds of workarounds for each individual site. I'm also discussing with the Webrecorder and Archive.org teams how we can to share these site-specific workarounds as cross-compatible plugins (aka "behaviors") between our various software.

> it quietly leaks everything you archive to archive.org by default

It's prominently mentioned many times (at least 4) on our homepage that this is the default, and archiving public-only sites (which are already fair game for Archive.org) is a default for good reason. Archiving private content requires several important changes and security considerations. More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866689

Re: ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives

#8

https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site might be helpful. I'm a fan of the ability to create WARC archives from a target, uploard the WARC files to object storage (whether that is IA, S3, Backblaze B2, etc), and then keep them in cold storage or serve them up via HTTPS or a torrent (mutable, preferred). The Internet Archive serves a torrent file for every item they host; one can do the same with WARC archives to ena…

I recommend Browsertrix for WARC creation, I think they are the best currently available for WARC/WACZ.

ArchiveBox is also gearing up to support real cryptographic signing of archives using https://tlsnotary.org/ in an upcoming plugin. (in a way that actually solves the TLS non-repudation issue, which traditional "signing a WARC" does not, more info: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/nd...)

Re: ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives

#9
post #6

Is this a project that could be developed to support a distributed mirror of archive.org similar to how Anna's Archive works?

Yeah that's what we're aiming for eventually, but with the addition of fine-grained permissions controls so you don't have to share everything 100% publically, you can choose a subset.

https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Roadmap

Re: ArchiveBox is evolving: the future of self-hosted internet archives

#10

https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site might be helpful. I'm a fan of the ability to create WARC archives from a target, uploard the WARC files to object storage (whether that is IA, S3, Backblaze B2, etc), and then keep them in cold storage or serve them up via HTTPS or a torrent (mutable, preferred). The Internet Archive serves a torrent file for every item they host; one can do the same with WARC archives to ena…

I recommend Browsertrix for WARC creation, I think they are the best currently available for WARC/WACZ. ArchiveBox is also gearing up to support real cryptographic signing of archives using https://tlsnotary.org/ in an upcoming plugin. (in a way that actually solves the TLS non-repudation issue, which traditional "signing a WARC" does not, more info: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/nd... )

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