MWoffliner is a tool for making a local offline HTML snapshot of any online MediaWiki instance. It goes through all online articles (or a selection if specified) and create the corresponding ZIM file. It has mainly been tested against Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia and Wiktionary --- but it should also work for any recent MediaWiki.
Read CONTRIBUTING.md to know more about MWoffliner development.
User Help is available in the for a a FAQ.
- Scrape with or without image thumbnail
- Scrape with or without audio/video multimedia content
- S3 cache (optional)
- Image size optimiser / Webp converter
- Scrape all articles in namespaces or title list based
- Specify additional/non-main namespaces to scrape
Run mwoffliner --help to get all the possible options.
- *NIX Operating System (GNU/Linux, macOS, ...)
- Redis
- NodeJS version 24 (we support only one single Node.JS version, other versions might work or not)
- Libzim (On GNU/Linux & macOS we automatically download it)
- Various build tools which are probably already installed on your
machine (packages
libjpeg-dev,libglu1,autoconf,automake,gccon Debian/Ubuntu)
... and an online MediaWiki with its API available.
To install latest released MWoffliner version from NPM repo (use -g to install globally, not only in current folder):
npm i -g mwofflinerWarning
Note that you might need to run this command with the sudo command, depending
how your npm / OS is configured. npm permission checking can be a bit annoying for a
newcomer. Please read the documentation carefully if you hit problems: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/using-npm/scripts#user
Then you can run the scraper:
mwoffliner --helpTo use MWoffliner with a S3 cache, you should provide a S3 URL like this:
--optimisationCacheUrl="https://wasabisys.com/?bucketName=my-bucket&keyId=my-key-id&secretAccessKey=my-sac"If you've retrieved mwoffliner source code (e.g. with a git clone of our repo), you can then install and run it locally (including with your local modifications):
npm i
npm run mwoffliner -- --helpDetailed contribution documentation and guidelines are available.
MWoffliner provides also an API and therefore can be used as a NodeJS library. Here a stub example that could go in your index.mjs file:
import * as mwoffliner from 'mwoffliner';
const parameters = {
mwUrl: "https://es.wikipedia.org",
adminEmail: "[email protected]",
verbose: true,
format: "nopic",
articleList: "./articleList"
};
mwoffliner.execute(parameters); // returns a PromiseComplementary information about MWoffliner:
- MediaWiki software is used by thousands of wikis, the most famous ones being the Wikimedia ones, including Wikipedia.
- MediaWiki is a PHP wiki runtime engine.
- Wikitext is the name of the markup language that MediaWiki uses.
- MediaWiki includes a parser for WikiText into HTML, and this parser creates the HTML pages displayed in your browser.
- Have a look at the scraper functional architecture
GPLv3 or later, see LICENSE for more details.
This project received funding through NGI Zero Core, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Learn more at the NLnet project page.
