---
id: waybackpy
version: "3.0.6"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: dormant
---

# waybackpy — Python package that interfaces with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine APIs. Archive pages and retrieve archived pages easily.

License: permissive · Maintenance: dormant · Downloads: 4.9M/mo

## What it is and what it does

Waybackpy is a Python library and command-line tool that wraps three Internet Archive Wayback Machine APIs: SavePageNow (to archive a live page), CDX Server (to query historical snapshots with filtering), and Availability (to find oldest, newest, or near-date snapshots). It lets you programmatically save web pages to the archive, retrieve snapshots from specific dates, and iterate over all archived versions of a URL without writing raw HTTP requests.

The package is pure Python, depends only on click, requests, and urllib3, and supports Python 3.6 and later. It works both as an importable module for scripts and as a standalone CLI tool. The library is marked Production/Stable but has been dormant since early 2022, meaning it is unlikely to receive updates for new Wayback Machine API changes, though it remains functional for standard archiving and retrieval tasks.

Use it for:

- Archive a live web page to the Wayback Machine and retrieve its archive URL for documentation or citation.
- Query historical snapshots of a website to find when content changed or to retrieve a specific version from a known date.
- Automate bulk archiving of multiple URLs or iterate over all snapshots of a site within a date range.
- Build a CLI tool or script that lets non-developers search and retrieve archived web pages without API knowledge.
- Verify that a page was archived at a specific time or retrieve the oldest available snapshot of a URL.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Waybackpy provides Python and CLI access to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine APIs—save pages, retrieve snapshots, and query historical web archives via SavePageNow, CDX Server, and Availability APIs.

Yes, if you need to interact with the Wayback Machine APIs and don't require active maintenance. The package is stable, has no known vulnerabilities, low install friction, and a permissive license. However, be aware that it has been dormant since 2022—if the Wayback Machine APIs change significantly, you may need to fork or patch it yourself. For read-heavy use it is low-risk; for heavy archiving workloads, test thoroughly first.

## Install

pip install waybackpy
uv add waybackpy
poetry add waybackpy

## Installing waybackpy

Before you install: Low install friction: pure Python wheel with three common dependencies (click, requests, urllib3). Maintenance is dormant—last release was 2022-03-15 and last commit 2024-02-26—but the package is marked Production/Stable and has no known vulnerabilities, so it remains usable for read-heavy Wayback Machine queries.

License in practice: MIT license (permissive) means you can use, modify, and distribute waybackpy freely in commercial or private projects with minimal restrictions—only attribution and license inclusion are required.

Quickstart:

pip install waybackpy

from waybackpy import WaybackMachineSaveAPI
url = "https://example.com"
user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"
save_api = WaybackMachineSaveAPI(url, user_agent)
archive_url = save_api.save()
print(archive_url)

Requires a user-agent string when instantiating API classes; the Wayback Machine APIs enforce this for request identification.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the package's dormant status affects reliability of Wayback Machine API calls as the Internet Archive's APIs evolve.
- Performance characteristics when querying large date ranges or handling high-volume snapshot iteration.

## Package facts

- License: MIT (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: dormant
- Downloads: 4.9M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

wayback machine api python, internet archive snapshots, save web pages to archive, cdx server api client, historical web page retrieval, web archiving automation, wayback machine cli tool, web-archiving, internet-archive, cli-tool

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