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Title: Host your own wikipedia backup
Author: Solène
Date: 13 November 2019
Tags: openbsd wikipedia life
Description:
## Wikipedia and openzim
If you ever wanted to host your own wikipedia replica, here is the
simplest
way.
As wikipedia is REALLY huge, you don't really want to host a php
wikimedia
software and load the huge database, instead, the project made the
*openzim*
format to compress the huge database that wikipedia became while
allowing using
it for fast searches.
Sadly, on OpenBSD, we have no software reading zim files and most
software
requires the library openzim to work which requires extra work to get
it as a
package on OpenBSD.
Hopefully, there is a python package implementing all you need as pure
python
to serve zim files over http and it's easy to install.
This tutorial should work on all others unix like systems but packages
or
binary names may change.
## Downloading wikipedia
The project Kiwix is responsible for wikipedia files, they create
regularly
files from various projects (including stackexchange, gutenberg,
wikibooks
etc...) but for this tutorial we want wikipedia:
[https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages](https://wiki.kiw
ix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages)
You will find a lot of files, the language is contained into the
filename. Some
filenames will also self explain if they contain everything or
categories, and
if they have pictures or not.
The full French file is 31.4 GB worth.
## Running the server
For the next steps, I recommend setting up a new user dedicated to
this.
On OpenBSD, we will require python3 and pip:
$ doas pkg_add py3-pip--
Then we can use pip to fetch and install dependencies for the zimply
software,
the flag `--user` is rather important as it allows any user to download
and
install python libraries in its home folder instead of polluting the
whole
system as root.
$ pip3.7 install --user --upgrade zimply
I wrote a small script to start the server using the zim file as a
parameter, I
rarely write python so the script may not be high standard.
File **server.py**:
from zimply import ZIMServer
import sys
import os.path
print("usage: " + sys.argv[0] + " file")
exit(1)
ZIMServer(sys.argv[1])
else:
print("Can't find file " + sys.argv[1])
And then you can start the server using the command:
$ python3.7 server.py /path/to/wikipedia_fr_all_maxi_2019-08.zim
You will be able to access wikipedia on the url http://localhost:9454/
Note that this is not a "wiki" as you can't see history and edit/create
pages.
This kind of backup is used in place like Cuba or Africa areas where
people
don't have unlimited internet access, the project lead by Kiwix allow
more
people to access knowledge.
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