drumsergio/wayback-diff repository overview

Detect meaningful differences between web pages, with Wayback Machine artifact cleaning, visual comparison and significance scoring.

Comparing web pages gets hard once Wayback Machine injections, whitespace noise and visual changes the DOM does not show come into play. Wayback-Diff is a CLI that handles all three and tells you how much each change matters.

⁠Features

• Strips Wayback Machine banners, analytics and playback scripts, and URL rewrites, so you compare the real content.
• Tags every change High, Medium or Low.
• Screenshots in Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera, with side-by-side and pixel-diff images (--visual).
• Site-wide crawl and compare with --traverse --max-depth N.
• Text, JSON and unified diff output, plus Markdown reports (--markdown).
• CI exit codes: 0 no changes, 1 low or medium, 2 high.
• Installs from PyPI, from source or as a Docker image.

⁠Quick start

pip install wayback-diff
wayback-diff https://web.archive.org/web/20230101/https://example.com/ https://example.com/

Add --visual --markdown for screenshots and a report (pip install "wayback-diff[visual]" first). Needs Python 3.10 or newer; the source and Docker installs are in Getting started⁠.

⁠Documentation

• Getting started⁠: PyPI, source, Docker
• Usage⁠: options, visual comparison, Markdown reports, output formats, and CI/CD gates on the exit codes
• How it works⁠: cleaning, significance scoring, comparison with similar tools
• Development⁠: tests and contributing
• Related projects⁠

⁠License

GPL-3.0-or-later⁠