====== Mirroring Wikipedia ======

The simplest way to mirror Wikipedia is using the [[https://kiwix.org/|Kiwix tools]] and a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIM_(file_format)|Zim]] format snapshot.

===== Getting a snapshot =====

Downloading one of these snapshots is fairly simple - the Kiwix site [[https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/|maintains pages with links]] to ''zim'' files for various facets of Wikipedia. They're broken down by language (''en'', in the filename), topic-specific (eg [[https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_chemistry_mini_2024-04.zim|Chemistry]]) and other variations (options like mini, maxi, nopic allow us to further control how much data we're willing download.)

So to download that Chemistry snapshot, we could use a command like this:

''curl -L https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_chemistry_mini_2024-04.zim -o wikipedia_en_chemistry_mini_2024-04.zim''

(The '-L' flag tells Curl to follow redirects (which the Kiwix links are) and the '-o' allows us to specify the filename for the downloaded file.)

===== Serving the snapshot =====

On a Debian-based system (like Ubuntu or RaspberryPi OS) you can install the Kiwix Tools (including their server) like this:

''sudo apt-get install kiwix-tools''

...and then run the serving app with our snapshot like this:

''kiwix-serve -p 8080 wikipedia_en_chemistry_mini_2024-04.zim''

...which will print out a URL (something like ''http://192.168.1.223:8080/'') where we can view our site.

(The '-p' flag allows us to specify the port we'll find our site on - if we omit this option ''kiwix-serve'' will try to run on the normal HTTP port (80) which will fail, unless we also run the command as root, by prepending ''sudo'' to it.)