Submission declined on 11 May 2026 by Flyingphoenixchips (talk). This draft's references do not show that the subject meets Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion. The draft requires multiple published secondary sources that: provide significant coverage: discuss the subject in detail, not just brief mentions or routine announcements; are reliable: from reputable outlets with editorial oversight; are independent: not connected to the subject, such as interviews, press releases, the subject's own website, or sponsored content. Please add references that meet all three of these criteria. If none exist, the subject is not yet suitable for Wikipedia. If you would like to continue working on the submission, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. If you have not resolved the issues listed above, your draft will be declined again and potentially deleted. If you need extra help, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. Please do not remove reviewer comments or this notice until the submission is accepted. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. How to improve a draft Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia – a basic overview on how to edit Wikipedia. Help:Wikitext – how to use the markup Help:Referencing for beginners – how to include references Wikipedia:Article development – how to develop your article Wikipedia:Writing better articles – how to improve your article Wikipedia:Verifiability – make sure your article includes reliable third-party sources You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Add tags to your draft Editor resources Easy tools: Citation bot (help) | Advanced: Fix bare URLs Declined by Flyingphoenixchips 26 days ago. Last edited by Flyingphoenixchips 26 days ago. Reviewer: Inform author. Resubmit Please note that if the issues are not fixed, the draft will be declined again.

• Comment: Hey, thanks for the submission and for disclosing your conflict of interest upfront, that's appreciated. ː) Unfortunately this draft isn't quite ready for acceptance yet. The main issue is notability: Wikipedia requires significant coverage from independent, reliable sources, but the only reference here is the project's own GitHub repository. We'd need to see articles or write-ups about WebArchiver from journalists, researchers, or other third parties with no connection to the project. Given the conflict of interest and that the software is at v0.1.0, it may simply be too early, and there's nothing wrong with coming back once the project has gained more outside coverage. Feel free to keep improving the draft in the meantime. If you can demonstrate notability as per above feel free to resubmit. Flyingphoenixchips (talk) 04:41, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: In accordance with Wikipedia's Conflict of interest guideline, I disclose that I have a conflict of interest regarding the subject of this article. MulderCW (talk) 13:40, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

WebArchiver is a free and open-source web archiving tool that creates, reads, replays, and manages WARC files. It provides a web-based graphical interface and REST API for capturing websites, viewing archived content directly in the browser, and downloading standard WARC files. The project was created with the goal of providing a no-cost alternative to commercial web archiving services, allowing users to work with the WARC file format without requiring paid software.^[1]

The Web ARChive (WARC) format, standardized as ISO 28500:2017, is the primary file format used for storing web crawl data.^[2] It was originally developed by the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) and is used by major institutions including the Internet Archive and national libraries worldwide.^[3]

While the WARC format itself is an open standard, many of the tools for creating and viewing WARC files are either commercial products, command-line-only utilities, or components of larger institutional archiving systems. WebArchiver was developed to address this gap by providing a self-hosted, browser-based tool that handles the complete archiving workflow — from crawling to replay — in a single application.

WebArchiver uses a client–server model with a Node.js backend and React frontend, packaged as a Docker container for deployment.

The software includes a custom WARC 1.1 engine that implements the full ISO 28500:2017 specification. It supports all eight WARC record types (warcinfo, response, resource, request, revisit, metadata, conversion, and continuation), per-record gzip compression for random access, SHA-256 digest computation for integrity verification, and deduplication through revisit records.^[2]

The parser operates as a streaming finite-state machine that processes WARC files incrementally, supporting multi-gigabyte files without loading them entirely into memory. A CDX (Capture Index) maps each archived URL to its byte offset within the WARC file, enabling direct access to individual records.

The crawler uses Playwright to control a headless Chromium browser, capturing not only the initial HTML but all resources loaded dynamically by JavaScript — including ECMAScript module imports, XHR/Fetch responses, web fonts, and CSS. The crawler waits for all network activity to settle before completing a page capture, ensuring that single-page applications and sites using dynamic module loading are fully archived.^[1]

Multiple pages are crawled concurrently using a worker pool model. A per-domain rate limiter serializes requests to the same domain while allowing parallel requests to different domains, preventing excessive load on target servers. The crawler respects robots.txt directives by default.

During each crawl, a full-page screenshot is captured and stored as a WARC resource record within the archive file.

The replay system serves archived content directly from WARC files in the user's browser. It employs a multi-layer approach to ensure archives are fully self-contained:

• Server-side URL rewriting — All URLs in HTML attributes (href, src, srcset, etc.), CSS (url(), @import), and HTTP redirect Location headers are rewritten to route through the replay server

• Client-side interception — An injected JavaScript shim overrides fetch() and XMLHttpRequest to rewrite dynamically constructed URLs at runtime

• Content Security Policy — A strict CSP header (connect-src 'self') instructs the browser to block any request that escapes the URL rewriting

• Iframe sandboxing — Archived content is rendered in a sandboxed iframe that prevents navigation to external sites

HTTP redirect chains (such as CDN 302 redirects) are resolved internally within the archive, serving the final destination content transparently.

WebArchiver supports re-crawling archived sites to create new versions. A diff engine compares versions at the URL level using payload digests, identifying resources that were added, removed, or changed between crawls. This enables tracking of how websites evolve over time.

The application uses SQLite as its database, requiring no external database server. All data — the WARC files, CDX indexes, crawl metadata, and audit logs — is stored in a single data directory, simplifying backup and migration.

• Web archiving

• WARC (file format)

• Internet Archive

• International Internet Preservation Consortium

• Wayback Machine

• Digital preservation

• WARC 1.1 Specification

• ISO 28500:2017 — WARC file format