MWoffliner

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.

Features

• 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.

Prerequisites

• *NIX Operating System (GNU/Linux, macOS, ...)
• Redis
• NodeJS version 22 (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, gcc on Debian/Ubuntu)

... and an online MediaWiki with its API available.

Usage

To install latest released MWoffliner version from NPM repo (use -g to install globally, not only in current folder):

npm i -g mwoffliner

Warning

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 --help

To 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"

Contribute

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 -- --help

Detailed contribution documentation and guidelines are available.

API

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: "foo@bar.net",
    verbose: true,
    format: "nopic",
    articleList: "./articleList"
};
mwoffliner.execute(parameters); // returns a Promise

Background

Complementary 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

License

GPLv3 or later, see LICENSE for more details.