WAIL For Mac

WAIL offers you the possibility to use various web archiving tools to crawl any website via a minimalist graphical user interface.

The WAIL  utility allows you to use the Heritrix and the OpenWayback software solutions to crawl websites and view their content even if you don’t have an active internet connection.

To make sure everything will go smoothly, move the WAIL utility to your Applications folder and make sure that you have the Java 7 Update 79 version installed on your system.

Once you launch the WAIL app, all you have to do is provide the URL address for the website you want to store locally and press the Archive now button.

You can check if the crawling procedure is complete at any time, and choose to see the archive in your default web browser if it is. Depending on the website size, and the depth configuration for the crawling tool, the process might take some time.

Within the WAIL Advanced panel you can see the status of the Wayback and Heritrix tools, choose to open the archives storage folder in a Finder window, configure the OpenWayback installation, or view the status of the crawling jobs in the Heritrix panel.

Note that to configure the OpenWayback tool you must edit the wayback.xml file which might prove to be challenging. However, you can learn more about the procedure in the OpenWayback Wiki page.

Within the Heritrix panel, you get to see the currently active crawling jobs, how many links have been discovered, and the number of queued and downloaded web pages.

WAIL is using the same technology on which the online Wayback Machine website is based on and allows you to crawl and store any web page locally. As a result, you will have access to the web pages even if you are offline, or if the content is no longer available online.