Auto Archiver

Read the article about Auto Archiver on bellingcat.com.

Python script to automatically archive social media posts, videos, and images from a Google Sheets document. Uses different archivers depending on the platform, and can save content to local storage, S3 bucket (Digital Ocean Spaces, AWS, ...), and Google Drive. The Google Sheets where the links come from is updated with information about the archived content. It can be run manually or on an automated basis.

Requirement configurations

Running with docker

Running without docker

Setup checklist

Use this to make sure you help making sure you did all the required steps:

• you have a /secrets folder with all your configuration files including
  • a configuration file eg: config.yaml pointing to the correct location of other files
  • you have a service_account.json
  • (optional for telegram) a anon.session which appears after the 1st run to avoid logging into the
  • (optional for VK) a vk_config.v2.json
  • (optional for using GoogleDrive storage) gd-token.json
  • (optional for instagram) instaloader.session file which appears after the 1st run and login in telegram
  • (optional for browsertrix) profile.tar.gz file

Private telegram channels

• Cannot use bot token
• Should have one with bot token, one without
• Setup join all private invite links at the start

Setup

Always required

1. A Google Service account is necessary for use with gspread. Credentials for this account should be stored in service_account.json, in the same directory as the script.
2. A configuration file, see Configuration file.

With docker image

Docker is like a virtual machine program that isolates all the installation dependencies needed for the auto-archiver and it should be the only thing you need to install.

Without docker

Check this tutorial video for setup without the docker image.

If you are using pipenv (recommended), pipenv install is sufficient to install Python prerequisites.

You need to install the following requirements on your machine:

1. A Google Service account is necessary for use with gspread. Credentials for this account should be stored in service_account.json, in the same directory as the script.
2. ffmpeg must also be installed locally for this tool to work.
3. firefox and geckodriver on a path folder like /usr/local/bin.
4. fonts-noto to deal with multiple unicode characters during selenium/geckodriver's screenshots: sudo apt install fonts-noto -y.
5. Internet Archive credentials can be retrieved from https://archive.org/account/s3.php.
6. If you would like to take archival WACZ snapshots using browsertrix-crawler in addition to screenshots you will need to install Docker.
   1. To improve the websites browsertrix can archive you can also create a custom profile by running docker run -p 9222:9222 -p 9223:9223 -v $PWD/browsertrix/crawls/profiles:/crawls/profiles/ -it webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler create-login-profile --interactive --url "https://youtube.com", going to http://localhost:9223/ and accepting the cookies prompt on youtube, and then navigating to other websites and logging in as per your needs, so as to access more publicly blocked content, and then specifying the created profile.tar.gz in your config file under execution.browsertrix.profile.

Configuration file

Configuration is done via a config.yaml file (see example.config.yaml) and some properties of that file can be overwritten via command line arguments. Make a copy of that file and rename it to your liking eg. config-test.yaml . Here is the current result from running the python auto_archive.py --help:

python auto_archive.py --help

usage: auto_archive.py [-h] [--config CONFIG] [--storage {s3,local,gd}] [--sheet SHEET] [--header HEADER] [--check-if-exists] [--save-logs] [--s3-private] [--col-url URL] [--col-status STATUS] [--col-folder FOLDER]
                       [--col-archive ARCHIVE] [--col-date DATE] [--col-thumbnail THUMBNAIL] [--col-thumbnail_index THUMBNAIL_INDEX] [--col-timestamp TIMESTAMP] [--col-title TITLE] [--col-duration DURATION]
                       [--col-screenshot SCREENSHOT] [--col-hash HASH]

Automatically archive social media posts, videos, and images from a Google Sheets document. 
The command line arguments will always override the configurations in the provided YAML config file (--config), only some high-level options
are allowed via the command line and the YAML configuration file is the preferred method. The sheet must have the "url" and "status" for the archiver to work.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --config CONFIG       the filename of the YAML configuration file (defaults to 'config.yaml')
  --storage {s3,local,gd}
                        which storage to use [execution.storage in config.yaml]
  --sheet SHEET         the name of the google sheets document [execution.sheet in config.yaml]
  --header HEADER       1-based index for the header row [execution.header in config.yaml]
  --check-if-exists     when possible checks if the URL has been archived before and does not archive the same URL twice [exceution.check_if_exists]
  --save-logs           creates or appends execution logs to files logs/LEVEL.log [exceution.save_logs]
  --s3-private          Store content without public access permission (only for storage=s3) [secrets.s3.private in config.yaml]
  --col-url URL         the name of the column to READ url FROM (default='link')
  --col-status STATUS   the name of the column to FILL WITH status (default='archive status')
  --col-folder FOLDER   the name of the column to READ folder FROM (default='destination folder')
  --col-archive ARCHIVE
                        the name of the column to FILL WITH archive (default='archive location')
  --col-date DATE       the name of the column to FILL WITH date (default='archive date')
  --col-thumbnail THUMBNAIL
                        the name of the column to FILL WITH thumbnail (default='thumbnail')
  --col-thumbnail_index THUMBNAIL_INDEX
                        the name of the column to FILL WITH thumbnail_index (default='thumbnail index')
  --col-timestamp TIMESTAMP
                        the name of the column to FILL WITH timestamp (default='upload timestamp')
  --col-title TITLE     the name of the column to FILL WITH title (default='upload title')
  --col-duration DURATION
                        the name of the column to FILL WITH duration (default='duration')
  --col-screenshot SCREENSHOT
                        the name of the column to FILL WITH screenshot (default='screenshot')
  --col-hash HASH       the name of the column to FILL WITH hash (default='hash')

Example invocations

All the configurations can be specified in the YAML config file, but sometimes it is useful to override only some of those like the sheet that we are running the archival on, here are some examples (possibly prepended by pipenv run):

# all the configurations come from config.yaml
python auto_archive.py

# all the configurations come from config.yaml,
# checks if URL is not archived twice and saves logs to logs/ folder
python auto_archive.py --check-if-exists --save_logs

# all the configurations come from my_config.yaml
python auto_archive.py --config my_config.yaml

# reads the configurations but saves archived content to google drive instead
python auto_archive.py --config my_config.yaml --storage gd

# uses the configurations but for another google docs sheet 
# with a header on row 2 and with some different column names
python auto_archive.py --config my_config.yaml --sheet="use it on another sheets doc" --header=2 --col-link="put urls here"

# all the configurations come from config.yaml and specifies that s3 files should be private
python auto_archive.py --s3-private

Extra notes on configuration

Google Drive

To use Google Drive storage you need the id of the shared folder in the config.yaml file which must be shared with the service account eg autoarchiverservice@auto-archiver-111111.iam.gserviceaccount.com and then you can use --storage=gd

Telethon (Telegrams API Library)

The first time you run, you will be prompted to do a authentication with the phone number associated, alternatively you can put your anon.session in the root.

Running

The --sheet name property (or execution.sheet in the YAML file) is the name of the Google Sheet to check for URLs. This sheet must have been shared with the Google Service account used by gspread. This sheet must also have specific columns (case-insensitive) in the header row (see COLUMN_NAMES in gworksheet.py), only the link and status columns are mandatory:

• Link (required): the location of the media to be archived. This is the only column that should be supplied with data initially
• Archive status (required): the status of the auto archiver script. Any row with text in this column will be skipped automatically.
• Destination folder: (optional) by default files are saved to a folder called name-of-sheets-document/name-of-sheets-tab/ using this option you can organize documents into folder from the sheet.
• Archive location: the location of the archived version. For files that were not able to be auto archived, this can be manually updated.
• Archive date: the date that the auto archiver script ran for this file
• Upload timestamp: the timestamp extracted from the video. (For YouTube, this unfortunately does not currently include the time)
• Upload title: the "title" of the video from the original source
• Hash: a hash of the first video or image found
• Screenshot: a screenshot taken with from a browser view of opening the page
• in case of videos
  • Duration: duration in seconds
  • Thumbnail: an image thumbnail of the video (resize row height to make this more visible)
  • Thumbnail index: a link to a page that shows many thumbnails for the video, useful for quickly seeing video content

For example, for use with this spreadsheet:

pipenv run python auto_archive.py --sheet archiver-test

When the auto archiver starts running, it updates the "Archive status" column.

The links are downloaded and archived, and the spreadsheet is updated to the following:

Note that the first row is skipped, as it is assumed to be a header row (--header=1 and you can change it if you use more rows above). Rows with an empty URL column, or a non-empty archive column are also skipped. All sheets in the document will be checked.

Automating

The auto-archiver can be run automatically via cron. An example crontab entry that runs the archiver every minute is as follows.

* * * * * python auto_archive.py --sheet archiver-test

With this configuration, the archiver should archive and store all media added to the Google Sheet every 60 seconds. Of course, additional logging information, etc. might be required.

auto_auto_archiver

To make it easier to set up new auto-archiver sheets, the auto-auto-archiver will look at a particular sheet and run the auto-archiver on every sheet name in column A, starting from row 11. (It starts here to support instructional text in the first rows of the sheet, as shown below.) You can simply use your default config as for auto_archiver.py but use --sheet to specify the name of the sheet that lists the names of sheets to archive.It must be shared with the same service account.

Docker development

• working with docker locally:
  • docker build . -t auto-archiver to build a local image
  • docker run --rm -v $PWD/secrets:/app/secrets aa --config secrets/config.yaml
    • to use local archive, also create a volume -v for it by adding -v $PWD/local_archive:/app/local_archive
• release to docker hub
  • docker image tag auto-archiver bellingcat/auto-archiver:latest
  • docker push bellingcat/auto-archiver (validate here)

Code structure

Code is split into functional concepts:

1. Archivers - receive a URL that they try to archive
2. Storages - they deal with where the archived files go
3. Utilities
   1. GWorksheet - facilitates some of the reading/writing tasks for a Google Worksheet

Current Archivers

Archivers are tested in a meaningful order with Wayback Machine being the failsafe, that can easily be changed in the code.

Note: We have 2 Twitter Archivers (TwitterArchiver, TwitterApiArchiver) because one requires Twitter API V2 credentials and has better results and the other does not rely on official APIs and misses out on some content.

graph TD
    A(Archiver) -->|parent of| B(TelethonArchiver)
    A -->|parent of| C(TiktokArchiver)
    A -->|parent of| D(YoutubeDLArchiver)
    A -->|parent of| D(InstagramArchiver)
    A -->|parent of| E(TelegramArchiver)
    A -->|parent of| F(TwitterArchiver)
    A -->|parent of| G(VkArchiver)
    A -->|parent of| H(WaybackArchiver)
    F -->|parent of| I(TwitterApiArchiver)

Current Storages

graph TD
    A(BaseStorage) -->|parent of| B(S3Storage)
    A(BaseStorage) -->|parent of| C(LocalStorage)
    A(BaseStorage) -->|parent of| D(GoogleDriveStorage)