swipswaps/webtimemachine

Creates (textual and visual) snapshots of webpages by parsing sitemap and stores them in git

Web Time Machine

WebTimeMachine creates visual and textual snapshot of web pages by processing site maps and stores them in a git repository.

This utility is designed out of the need to archive and inspect web page changes after each deployment. It git commits three different screenshots (mobile, tablet and desktop) plus html response of urls listed in your sitemap. This gives the benefit of inspecting changes done by each deployment from browser perspective.

This tool can be used as part of a CI build after deployment hook and it has capability to automatically push commits to a github repository.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/raminv80/webTimeMachine
cd webTimeMachine
npm install

Usage

This utility is designed for DevOps and is meant to be used as a tool to archive web pages up on deployment.

Once installation is complete run this command to create a snapshot:

npm start [--version=<verion_tag>] [--records=<artifacts_directory>] [--remote=<remote_git_url>] \ 
[--branch=<remote_branch>] [--verbose] [--batch=<batch_size>] <http(s)://url_to_your_website_sitemap.xml>

Option	Required	description	Default
version	no	Used as git commit message.	Unnamed version
records	no	path to the artifacts directory.	__dirname/records/
remote	no	Remote git repository URL	false: by default commits will not be pushed to remote
branch	no	Remote git branch	<website_domain_name>
verbose	no	Enables verbose mode	false
batch	no	Urls are processed in concurrently in batch size set by this option	3

This command creates four artifacts per url and stores them in <records_directory>/<your_website_domain>:

• Mobile snap shot: <webpage_path>_mobile.html
• Tablet snap shot: <webpage_path>_tablet.html
• Desktop snap shot: <webpage_path>_desktop.html
• Response body: <webpage_path>.html

Once all artifacts are created they will be committed to a git repository under <artifact_directory>/<your website domain> with commit message of <verion_tag>.

If remote option is set changes are pushed to the remote. branch option controls which remote branch will be used.

License

MIT.