How to upgrade

To help make adoption of the IIPC OpenWayback a more straightforward process, this page provides notes and tips for web archives going through the process of switching from an older version of the open-source Wayback (internetarchive/wayback) to the current IIPC OpenWayback (iipc/openwayback).

The National Library of Iceland and the British Libary, previously using Wayback 1.4.2 and 1.8.0-SNAPSHOT respectively, deployed OpenWayback for production. Both institutions chose clean installation of OpenWayback over migration.

Generally, the community's experience seems to be that migrating from Wayback versions prior to 1.8 is quite a cumbersome process, and it is, therefore, advisable for sites migrating from versions prior to 1.8 to start the configuration process from scratch.

The National Library of Australia however did upgrade Wayback instances from 1.4.2 to 2.0.0 BETA 2. NLA has not reported any significant problems except trying to replay newer CDXs generated by 2.0.0's cdx-indexer tool in 1.4.2. NLA's overlay can be found here: https://github.com/nla/nla-wayback.

It is worth noting that newer versions of Wayback are backwards compatible with older CDX files. This means no reindexing of data is required when upgrading the webapp. However, CDX files generated by newer versions of the Wayback cdx-indexer tool are not usable by webapp versions prior to 1.8 as the redirect URL field is no longer populated (see #114 for discussion).

Please contact the OpenWayback Development Mailing List if you encounter any issues or require assistance.