mcp-archive

6 Wayback Machine + Internet Archive tools for Claude. The one that doesn't blow your context window. Free, MIT.

Existing Wayback MCPs either dump raw HTML (blowing up the LLM context window) or are abandoned forks. mcp-archive returns clean readable text — stripped HTML, scripts, nav, Wayback toolbar — so you can actually fit archived pages in a Claude conversation.

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Install

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "archive": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@dpm-tools/mcp-archive"]
    }
  }
}

Requires Node.js 22.18+.

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Tools (6)

• archive_url — Push a URL to Wayback right now. Returns snapshot URL.
• get_archived — Get nearest Wayback snapshot for a URL/date.
• list_snapshots — List Wayback snapshots in a date range (CDX API).
• fetch_archived_text ⭐ — Fetches archived page and returns CLEAN READABLE TEXT (strips HTML, scripts, nav, toolbar). The key differentiator.
• search_archive_items — Search Internet Archive items (books, audio, video, software).
• compare_snapshots — Compare two snapshots of the same URL by extracted text.

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Example prompts

• "Archive this URL right now: https://example.com/important-page"
• "What did news.ycombinator.com look like on 2020-01-01?"
• "List all archived versions of openai.com from 2023."
• "Fetch the readable text of https://example.com archived in 2024."
• "Search the Internet Archive for 'public domain javascript books'."
• "Compare https://example.com between 2020 and 2024 — what changed?"

See examples/prompts.md for more.

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Why this exists

Researchers, journalists, and link-rot fighters need Wayback access. Existing MCPs in this space:

• 5+ personal forks, mostly abandoned
• Most return raw HTML — instantly blows up Claude's context window
• None offer text extraction + truncation

mcp-archive solves it: regex-only HTML→text extraction (no jsdom/cheerio deps), Wayback toolbar stripping, configurable max_chars. The id_ flag is used on snapshot URLs to fetch raw content without the toolbar at the source.

Zero API keys. Custom User-Agent. 200ms inter-call sleep on rate-limited operations to respect archive.org TOS.

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API sources (all free, all keyless)

• Wayback Machine availability API (archive.org/wayback/available)
• Wayback CDX search (web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx)
• Wayback save API (web.archive.org/save/)
• Internet Archive advanced search (archive.org/advancedsearch.php)

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Sister servers from dpm

• @dpm-tools/mcp-devkit — 15 dev utilities (UUID, hash, JWT, JSON, cron, color)
• @dpm-tools/mcp-public-data — sun, moon, holidays, geocoding (keyless)
• @dpm-tools/mcp-diff — diff, patch, 3-way merge

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License

MIT © dpm (digital product mill)