Simple Fish Shell Function to Create a Website Snapshot on Wayback Machine With Curl

Monday, April 3 2023

Today I remembered that it’s possible to send an archival request to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine by querying a specific URL. Searching the web didn’t produce a fitting result. I therefore remembered that I first learned about it by checking out the ArchiveBox source code:

https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/blob/32764347ce2e59919f763c552bd3e250f49c2f5b/archivebox/extractors/archive_org.py#L40-L94

Success! Then I went ahead with crafting a simple function to be able to call this from my terminal shell of choice, fish.

# ~/.config/fish/functions/archive_org.fish

function archive_org
    if not set -q argv[1]
        printf "Archives website via Wayback Machine and returns the archived URL.\n"
        printf "\tUsage: %s <URL>\n" (basename (status filename) .fish)
    else
        curl \
            -sL \
            --head \
            --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:95.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/95.0" \
            https://web.archive.org/save/$argv[1] | \
        grep "location: https://web.archive.org/web" | \
        sed "s/location: //"
    end
end

This could be written more elegantly in a proper programming language but why do it when this does what it’s supposed to do? I’m a fan of tiny helpers you’re not spending too much time on refining.