pywb Work Packages

Brief description of the project

IIPC funded the transition to pywb, an open-source replay tool developed by Webrecorder, and it continues to be adopted by IIPC member institutions. In 2024, the Tools Development Portfolio identified bugs and minor feature requests that were of priority to IIPC members of several tools, pywb included. A task force was formed to determine the future maintenance plan for pywb among IIPC member institutions. This project is one of the outcomes of the task force meetings and consists of work packages for Webrecorder to address the most urgent bug fixes and integrate client-side replay.

Deliverables:

• WP 1: Integration of client-side replay
• WP 2: Implementation of High-Priority Bug Fixes
• Follow-up bug fixes based on the deliverables of WP 1 and WP 2 and/or additional maintenance

Work Package 1: Integration of client-side replay

Key deliverables:

• To bundle wabac.js serviceworker with pywb and configure pywb to serve the serviceworker with an appropriate Service-Worker-Allowed header or from a root path (e.g. /sw.js)
• To add and document a configuration option to use wabac.js for HTML rewriting instead of pywb’s server-side rewriting. This option should initially be off, but the aim should be to enable it by default once there’s been some more testing and any major regressions have been resolved
• Documentation for CORS configuration.

Work Package 2: Implementation of high-priority bug fixes

• Pywb failing to handle self-redirects from OutbackCDX (https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb/issues/865)
• Strings not translatable in VueUI by default (https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb/issues/875)
• Adding date ranges to access control lists (https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb/issues/703)
• Full WACZ support
• datetime.datetime.utcnow deprecated in Python 3.12 (https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb/issues/913).

Follow-up fixes and/or maintenance

Additional support would either comprise follow-ups from the work items in Work Packages 1 and 2 requested by IIPC members in the 3 months following the successful delivery of both work packages or, if follow-ups are not needed or do not use the entirety of the budget, this time can be used for additional pywb maintenance tasks requested by IIPC.

Schedule

• WP1: January 1 – February 29, 2025
• WP2: March 1 – March 31, 2025
• Follow-up/maintenance phase: April 1 – June 1, 2025