was-pywb

This repository contains configuration and utilities for the pywb service running at swap.stanford.edu. A Docker configuration is included for development purposes. If you'd like to participate in discussion about the service please join the #web-archiving Slack channel, and subscribe to the sul-was-support discussion list.

Develop

When developing you can start the services, which will add some WARC and CDXJ data from test-data to the container:

$ docker compose up --build --detach

Then you should be able to open http://localhost:8080/ in your browser and select the was collection and lookup one of the following URLs:

• https://apod.nasa.gov
• https://stanford.edu

If you would like to test other WARC data you can copy it into pywb container:

$ docker compose cp test-data/apod.warc.gz pywb:web-archiving-stacks/data/collections/apod.warc.gz
$ docker compose cp test-data/stanford.warc.gz pywb:web-archiving-stacks/data/collections/stanford.warc.gz

Note: Wildcard copies are not currently supported by docker, so the above command needs to be executed for each individual file (i.e. apod.warc.gz) that you would like to include for development/testing.

Then you will need to update the index by running cdxj-indexer (using the Poetry Python environment):

$ docker compose exec pywb poetry run cdxj-indexer /web-archiving-stacks/data/collections/ --output /web-archiving-stacks/data/indexes/cdxj/index.cdxj --sort --post-append

Generating WARC data

Consider the --warc-file option of wget or ArchiveWeb.page (a Chrome extension) for creating local test WARC data. This can sometimes be helpful when trying to determine why certain sites are not replaying correctly.

Debugging

Sometimes you may be trying to determine why a given web page that was archived isn't playing back correctly. This could be the case where a particular URL isn't found at all, or (more commonly) when a given page doesn't completely display (missing images, or other content). Since there are many reasons why this can happen there is a separate Debugging for working with these issues.

Test

You can run the unit tests by starting the docker containers:

docker compose up --detach

and then running the tests in the pywb container:

docker compose exec pywb bundle exec rake

You can run the tests locally with bundle exec rake if you want, but you will need to have a working Python environment and pywb installed for them to pass.

Deploy

The was-pywb application is deployable via Capistrano like our other team projects, even though the app itself requires Python to run.

It is also deployable via the sdr-deploy application for mass-deploys (e.g., for weekly dependency updates).

Performance Benchmarking

The bin/benchmark script provides a means of establishing performance metrics against was-pywb.

There are several options available when running benchmarks:

❯ bin/benchmark -h
Usage: benchmark [options]
    -f, --file PATH                  The input file of URLs to use for benchmarking.
    -i, --index                      Visit the search results index for the given URLs.
    -n, --num INT                    The number of times to visit the root path.
    -p, --processes INT              The number of prcessses to run in parallel.
    -r, --root-only                  Only test the was-pywb homepage
    -h, --help

For example, to use 100 processes to visit the 1000 websites in urls.txt, execute:

bin/benchmark -f spec/fixtures/urls.txt -p 100

This will produce output like:

❯ bin/benchmark -f spec/fixtures/urls.txt -p 100
1000 urls/100 processes on WAS-PyWB |Time: 00:00:47 | ==================================================== | Time: 00:00:47
WAS-PyWB Complete.
Total data requested: 77590863
        Average page size: 77513
        Max page size: 14513632
        Min page size: 0
Total request time: 992.623845
        Actual request time: 9.92623845
        Max request time: 44.713049
        Min request time: 0.139367
        Avg request time: 0.9916322127872127

Similarly, a benchmark to visit the homepage 1000 times across 100 processes can be very useful when run concurrently with the above benchmark in order to determine the effect of various loads.

bin/benchmark -r -p 100 -n 1000

And benchmarking the search results index pages for each given URL as well:

bin/benchmark -f spec/fixtures/urls.txt -p 100 -i

Reset Process (For QA/Stage)

Steps

1. Clear collections: rm -rf /web-archiving-stacks/data/collections/*
2. Clear indexes: rm -rf /web-archiving-stacks/data/indexes/*
3. After was-registrar-app has been reset: i. Run the web_archive_accessioning_spec (bundle exec rspec spec/features/web_archiving_accessioning_spec.rb) integration test and verify that a One-time WARC is created. ii. Verify that https://library.stanford.edu/sites/all/themes/sulair2016/logo.svg is indexed: https://swap-stage.stanford.edu/was/*/https://library.stanford.edu/sites/all/themes/sulair2016/logo.svg