Offline Wikipedia is based

Caught myself browsing my offline Wikipedia today. I learned about pig animal behaviors, the genesis of PowerPC and Motorola’s role in it, the difference between Prairies and Savannas, that Acorns are produced by Oak trees, and that there are a bunch of minature pig breeds some which make for great pets.

It’s pretty easy to set up your very own offline Wikipedia. First grab a your languauge Wikipedia’s ZIM archive from the Kiwix Library. Search for Wikipedia find and download the entry with the largest file size. The English Wikipedia is about 115GB, other language Wikipedias have less entries with a smaller total file size.

(Don’t forget to browse for other useful zims, there are lots!)

Next grab the Kiwix Reader app. There is a native app for most platforms (Kiwix), a next-gen progressive web app which works much in the same way (Kiwix JS), and a web service (Kiwix Server).

I use a local Kiwix Server reverse proxied through Apache (or whatever httpd I got). Behind the scenes this setup employs a systemd unit to launch kiwix-serve and a rudimentary Python script to streamline kiwix-manage incantations.

But you don’t have to be clever. The PWA or Native app works well too. You’ll still need Kiwix Server for networked or multi-user ZIM collections.