It’s there. Finally, a tool for anyone to generate their own zim file!
Yes, it is that awesome. And it is called Zimit.
How does it work?
As you can see, the web interface is pretty lean – it is what we put under the hood that matters. On your end, you will only need:
- To indicate the full url of the website you want to carry offline;
- To provide an email address for us to send you the zim file when ready (we will not keep it, and you actually do not need it if you are willing to keep your browser window open for a couple of hours while our servers do the work)
- Press the “Zim it” button and wait for magic to happen.
What is the catch?
There is none! All the code is avaialble for free and can be found here: https://github.com/openzim/zimit. Look into it, poke at it, copy it: it’s there for the taking!
To be honest we did, in fact, encounter a couple of websites who did not end up properly packaged. These are rare, but if you do encounter such a problem please do open an issue.
If you decide to use the online (free) service, be mindful that we have put a limit to 1,000 items so it does not run us into the ground. But if you install your own local version from the code above, obviously the limitation is moot. You can also contact us and ask (nicely) for a full run on a particular website of interest. There might be a small fee as we are still trying to figure out how to make it accessible to as many people as possible, but the first step is to talk.
Last but not least: because this involves some pretty new technology, the zim files currrently only work on the Android and Server versions of Kiwix. Roll out to other plaforms will take place over the course of 2021.
Uh, thank you?
Well, thanks to all that made it possible: folks at Webrecorder for their hard work, and the Mozilla Foundation for granting us the Open Source Support Award that made it possible.