Please note that the recommended operating environment for OpenWayback is UNIX/Linux and this is assumed in this documentation.

OpenWayback is packaged as a web application file (.war file). You can choose to download the binary distribution or build from source.

All OpenWayback releases are hosted on Maven Central. You can find the latest binary release here, currently openwayback-2.3.1.

Extract the .tar.gz file containing the webapp (.war) file: tar -xzvf <filename>.tar.gz

This will produce a folder named ‘openwayback’ containing two (2) folders (bin and lib) and the web application file: ‘openwayback-(version).war’.

You can also build OpenWayback from the source yourself. Just follow these three steps:

Option 1 is to use Git to clone the repository. For this Git must be installed on the machine you are using.

Change to a directory where you’d like to download the source and run:

git clone https://github.com/iipc/openwayback.git

Option 2 is to download the source as a ZIP file.

This way you only download the current main branch of the code.

Change to a directory where you’d like to download the source and run:

wget https://github.com/iipc/openwayback/archive/master.zip;
mv master.zip openwayback.zip;
unzip openwayback.zip;
mv openwayback-master openwayback;

In either case you’ll end up with a directory named openwayback that contains the source for OpenWayback.

For this step you’ll need Apache Maven 2 or higher to be able build OpenWayback .

Change into the openwayback directory created in step 1 and run:

mvn package

This will build OpenWayback, running all unit tests along the way.

To skip unit test add -Dmaven.test.skip=true to the command. This is mostly useful on Windows machines as some unit tests can fail on Windows machines.

OpenWayback consists of several sub-modules, all of which are built when this method is invoked in the root of the project. You can also build the individual modules by changing into those directories, but this may cause Maven to fetch other OpenWayback modules from online repositories, rather than building on the downloaded code.

Once you’ve built OpenWayback as described above, you can find the full binary distribution under openwayback/dist/target/. You can then untar it and use in the same way that you’d use a pre-built distribution downloaded from the Internet and discussed above.

If you just need the WAR file (and not the various command line tools, such as the cdx-indexer) you can get that directly from openwayback/wayback-webapp/target/. It is the same file as the one added to the distribution tarball.

Apache Tomcat is required to run OpenWayback. Please refer to the README file in your Tomcat distribution for instructions. The instructions below assume that Tomcat is installed under the directory $CATALINA_HOME.

You must rename the .war web application file to ROOT.war before deploying it to Tomcat.

Please follow these steps:

  1. Locate the .war file you built or downloaded. Rename it to ROOT.war.
  2. Place the ROOT.war file in the webapps folder of Tomcat, usually $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/.
  3. Wait for Tomcat to unpack the .war file.
  4. Customise configuration file wayback.xml and possibly other XML configuration files. See How to configure for details.
  5. Restart Tomcat.

OpenWayback can also be deployed in a non-ROOT context. Please see Deploying OpenWayback in non-ROOT for details.