OpenWayback vs pywb Terms

pywb and OpenWayback use slightly different terms to describe the configuration options, as explained below.

Some differences are:
  • The wayback.xml config file in OpenWayback is replaced with config.yaml yaml
  • The terms Access Point and Wayback Collection are replaced with Collection in pywb. The collection configuration represents a unique path (access point) and the data that is accessed at that path.
  • The Resource Store in OpenWayback is known in pywb as the archive paths, configured under archive_paths
  • The Resource Index in OpenWayback is known in pywb as the index paths, configurable under index_paths
  • The Exclusions in OpenWayback are replaced with general Access Control System

Pywb Collection Basics

A pywb collection must consist of a minimum of three parts: the collection name, the index_paths (where to read the index), and the archive_paths (where to read the WARC files).

The collection is accessed by name, so there is no distinct access point.

The collections are configured in the config.yaml under the collections key:

For example, a basic collection definition can be specified via:

collections:
    wayback:
        index_paths: /archive/cdx/
        archive_paths: /archive/storage/warcs/

Pywb also supports a convention-based directory structure. Collections created in this structure can be detected automatically and need not be specified in the config.yaml. This structure is designed for smaller collections that are all stored locally in a subdirectory.

See the Directory Structure for the default pywb directory structure.

However, for importing existing collections from OpenWayback, it is probably easier to specify the existing paths as shown above.