A simple, CGI-based frontend for the Wayback Machine which works on old browsers without modern JavaScript or CSS support
Wayback Classic is available at wayback-classic.net. It supports both HTTP and HTTPS.
The Wayback Machine contains a lot of websites from the turn of the century which are perfect for browsing on older machines, but the interface the Wayback Machine itself presents is completely incompatible with many such systems, making it very difficult to navigate.
Wayback Classic attempts to provide a fully-functional frontend for the Wayback Machine, providing these systems with access without the extra technological requirements.
This is built on both the CDX API (for retrieving lists of page snapshots), as well as the undocumented __wb/search
API used by the Wayback Machine's own frontend to handle site search and determine if a site exists in the archive. More info about the site search can be found in this blog post.
If you wish to run your own instance, the author has two requests:
WEBMASTER_EMAIL
variable for CGI applications to an email address you can be reached at.User-Agent
string for requests to the Wayback Machine, and I would feel better knowing that other instances provide proper contact information. For Apache you can add use SetEnv
in a .htaccess
file.Further, there are some considerations:
bin/cache-clean
periodically to empty this cache, or it will build up.bin/dev-server
(described below) in production. Wayback Classic is a basic CGI application and should be deployed as such.Wayback Classic is licensed under the Affero General Public License version 3, or any later version of the AGPL, the text of which can be found in LICENSE.md, unless otherwise noted.
A basic, WEBrick-based development server script is included at bin/dev-server
. It defaults to localhost:8000
, but the port can be overridden by setting a PORT
environment variable.
While the root directory of this repository is intended to map directly to the root htdocs directory of a server, with no dependencies other than the Ruby standard library, a Gemfile
is provided under the tests
directory which contains dependencies for testing.
For testing purposes, the CGI scripts are loaded as Ruby modules instead of normal scripts, and their lifecycle is exercised by a minimal Rack application to facilitate the use of Capybara.
To run the test suite, open a terminal within the tests
directory, and run bundle && bundle exec rake
.