Wayback Machine

Load it

import { createArchive, providers } from "@agntn/archives";

const archive = createArchive(providers.wayback());
const yearly = createArchive(providers.wayback({ collapse: "timestamp:4" }));
const okOnly = createArchive(providers.wayback({ filter: "statuscode:200" }));

Or import WaybackProvider from @agntn/archives and construct it yourself.

What it lists

snapshots("example.com") asks web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx for example.com/*, so a domain lists everything under it. A full URL is looked up as is. Rows come back as original, timestamp, statuscode, digest, mimetype and length. _meta keeps the raw stamp of fourteen digits, the status, and digest, mime and length whenever the index knows them. The digest is the base32 SHA-1 of the archived body, so filter: "digest:<value>" finds every capture of those exact bytes. length is the size of the compressed WARC record, not of the page. The tool prints all four under each capture.

collapse defaults to timestamp:4, one capture per year, which keeps a domain with millions of captures answerable. Pass collapse: "timestamp:8" for one per day, or collapse: "digest" for one per distinct body. filter is passed through untouched (statuscode:200, mimetype:text/html, !statuscode:3..).

from and to narrow the CDX query itself, so a window is cheap here.

Reading bodies

const capture = await archive.getContent("https://example.com", { timestamp: "2002" });
capture.snapshot; // https://web.archive.org/web/20021129054348id_/http://www.example.com:80/

Bodies are read under the id_ modifier, which replays the original response without the toolbar or rewritten links. The capture is the newest at or before the timestamp, or the closest after it when nothing older exists. Got one of those? Its _meta.selection reads after. No posing as the older page. A snapshot URL from a listing works as the target too, and when it carries all fourteen digits it is still replayed if the CDX index is down, with _meta.selection set to pinned because the index never confirmed that capture.

Gotchas

• The CDX index answers oldest first. A merged providers.all() listing sorted newest first can cut every Wayback row when other archives hold newer captures. Ask Wayback alone for early history. Want this year's captures of one page instead? order: "newest" turns limit negative, and CDX sends the last rows.
• CDX queries for busy domains take seconds, sometimes close to a minute. That's why Wayback waits 60 seconds unless you name a timeout yourself, and why caching pays off here.
• collapse: "timestamp:4" is a default, not a fact about the archive. Drop it when you count captures.

Where it lives

src/providers/wayback.ts. CDX row mapping is shared with Archive-It and Common Crawl through mapCdxRows in src/utils/_utils.ts; id_ playback through readPlaybackCapture in src/utils/_content.ts.