Web Replay Gen

Generate a website for viewing web archives.

:globe_with_meridians: Live demo

Features

• Compatible with web archives in WACZ format (WARC also supported)
• Automatic deploy to GitHub Pages
• List & autocomplete-search web archives
• Embedded web archive replay
• Load web archives from any https:// or s3:// URLs.
• IPFS Support Coming soon

Jump to:

• Quick Start
• Configuration
• Deployment
• Dev Server
• Templates
• Web Components
• Styling

Quick Start

1. Create new project from template

In the new repository, go to "Settings" > "Pages" for the new repository and under "Source" select "GitHub Actions".

Once settings have been updated, clone your new repository as usual to your local machine.

2. Install dependencies

Navigate to your project directory and run:

npm install

3. Update wrg-config.json

Add your website title and web archive URL:

{
  "site": {
    "title": "My Web Archives"
  },
  "archives": [
    "https://replayweb.page/docs/assets/example.wacz",
    "s3://webrecorder-builds/warcs/netpreserve-twitter.warc"
  ]
}

See Configuration for all options.

4. Preview website

To access your site from http://localhost:8080, run:

npm run serve

5. Deploy to GitHub Pages

Push to main to automatically deploy your site to GitHub Pages. :sparkles:

You can also opt-out of Pages to use another hosting provider. See Deployment for more information.

Configuration

Configure options in wrg-config.json.

{
  "archives": [
    // Plain URL string:
    "https://replayweb.page/docs/assets/example.wacz"

    // Plain URL string to S3 bucket
    "s3://my-bucket/a/archive.wacz",

    // Plain URL string to a file relative to output `_site`
    "./public-data/",

    // Object with name and URL:
    {
      "name": "My Web Archive",
      "url": "s3://my-bucket/b/archive.wacz"
    }
  ]
}

Build-time options

The following options can only be set at build-time (i.e. when you run npm run build.) Updates to options in your output _site/wrg-config.json file will have no effect.

{
  "archivesPath": "./wacz-files/"
}

{
  "archivesPath": "./source_data/archives.json"
}

Deployment

Github Pages

By default, Web Replay Gen will deploy to Pages on every push to the main branch, as configured in this GitHub Workflow. To change the deployment workflow (e.g. to change the release branch) update the publish-gh-pages.yml workflow file.

Local web archive support

Due to GitHub's file size limit and lack of support for git LFS in Pages, you may run into an issue with deploying large web archive files. To resolve the issue, you can create a separate workflow for uploading web archive files elsewhere (e.g. to an S3 bucket) and configure your site with the remote URLs. Alternatively, you can self-host.

Opt-Out

To prevent deployment to Pages, either disable the workflow through the GitHub UI or simply delete the workflow file (publish-gh-pages.yml.)

Self-hosting

First, remove the Pages workflow. Run the build script to output your site into a local directory:

npm run build

This will output a production-ready build to /_site. Transfer the contents of /_site to your host.

Dev Server

Run the dev server with npm run serve to serve files from /_site.

Saving changes to src will automatically reload the page. See 11ty Browsersync docs to customize the dev server.

Local configuration

Create and configure options in wrg-config.local.json to specify different site options during local development.

To use wrg-local.local.json, run the following:

echo 'WRG_CONFIG_NAME=wrg-config.local.json' > .env

To disable, comment out the line in .env:

# WRG_CONFIG_NAME=wrg-config.local.json

Templates

Web Replay Gen templates are written in Nunjucks. You are free to use any templating language Eleventy supports, like plain HTML, markdown, or ejs.

Web Components & client-side JavaScript

JS files in /js will be copied as-is to _site. To include JS files in templates, import as ES modules and use module-shim. For example, to render a Web Component called my-component:

<!-- my-template.njk -->
<my-component></my-component>

<script type="module-shim">
  import('./js/my-component.js');
</script>

Styling

TailwindCSS

TailwindCSS is enabled in all Eleventy template files. You can install a specific Tailwind version with npm install -D tailwindcss@{version}.

Note: Tailwind is not available in web components (/components/*.js) due to limitations with the shadow DOM. See workarounds if you'd like to access Tailwind classes in web components.

Customization

Tailwind supports inline-style-like customization through arbitrary values in class names. For a more global approach to customization (for example, if you have vendor CSS file) include a <link rel="stylesheet"> tag in your template file. Any .css files in /src will be copied to the output site folder and can be referenced in the <link> tag.