Zim-tools 3.0.0 is out!

2021, Release notes

After announcing the libzim7 release a month ago, we are proud to follow-up with the release of version 3.0.0 of the Zim-tools.

Zim-tools is the Swiss-army knife for manipulating ZIM files and is actually a suite of command line tools (more info on building and manipulating zim files on the openZIM project).

The most famous / most popular tools are:

  • zimcheck verifies that a given ZIM file is not corrupted. It provides many features to secure that ZIM entries are proper and properly linked.

  • zimdump inspects or dumps (part of) a ZIM file.

  • zimwriterfs creates ZIM files from a locally-stored directory containing “self-sufficient” HTML content (with pictures, javascript and stylesheets). The result will contain all the files of the local directory compressed and merged in the ZIM file. Nothing more, nothing less. The generated file can be opened with a ZIM reader; Kiwix is one example, but there are others.

A few other are provided but are of less value for most of uses.

It has been almost a year since we began working on this new release. Along with support for libzim7 and major improvements to the zimcheck tool here is the changelog:

  • zimwriterfs:
    • Do not allow zimwriterfs to overwrite an existing zim file
    • Do not use the extension of file as mimetype
  • zimcheck:
    • Make zimcheck print json output with option `–json`
    • Make zimcheck multithreaded
    • Add an option to check for redirection loops
    • Add zimcheck unit tests
    • Improve performance of detection of the kind of url
    • Support new protocols xmpp, news and urn
  •  zimrecreate:
    • Add an option `-j` to not create fulltext index
    • Add option `-J` (–threads) to set the number of threads to use
  • Removed zstd compression options. We are now always creating zim files with zstd
  • zimdump:
    • zimdump now print the favicon and mainentry path instead of the index
    • Add an option to create html redirect insteal of symlink
    • Fix issue where zimdump crash depending of the stored path of redirection
    • Fix argument –ns not working
  • Fixed http redirect
  • Adapted zim tools to new libzim api
  • Compiled zimsearch binary only if libzim is compiled with xapian
  • Docker : Better open zimtools image

This new release is an important milestone in our global QA effort around ZIM files. The latest Zimcheck has already been integrated in our Zimfarm and its new machine readable output can now be checked in our (currently being built) CMS.

From a more general point of view, improving the Zim-tools is essential to allow hackers to easily deal with the ZIM files and maybe even produce their own.

More info at https://github.com/openzim/zim-tools