Running WAIL

Launching WAIL

WAIL can be launched by double-clicking the binary. If renaming the application, do not put a space in the name, as Heritrix has some pending issues with paths that contain a space.

Initial setup

When the application is run for the first time, an automated setup screen will appear. This screen displays the progress of the setup performed by WAIL.

If you are a OS X user and do not have the Java 1.7 JDK installed, WAIL will guide you through the Java installation process. This step is required to use Heritrix, which is packaged with WAIL, and to conform with Apple's requirements for Java on macOS. For all other supported operating systems, a build of the OpenJDK is packaged with the application.

If the installation of the Java 1.7 JDK was required, the initial setup screen will be displayed again but will detect that it is installed and continue with the rest of the setup. Subsequent launches of WAIL after initial setup will not trigger this screen. Instead, the general start up screen will be displayed.

Created directories

WAIL creates two directories during the initial setup:

WAIL_ManagedCollections

The location of the Web Archive Collections created through WAIL

WAIL_Managed_Crawls

The location of the Heritrix Crawls created through WAIL

These directories are located in the **default documents** directory of the respective operating system WAIL is run on.

Start Up Process

After initial setup, WAIL will display a general start up screen containing the loading progress and any errors that occurred in starting up WAIL.

The start up process is broken down into two step:

1. Start up Heritrix and Wayback if they are not already running
2. Load the collections and crawls

Once completed, the loading screen will close and the main UI will be displayed.