Extension:Offline

Overview
Supported platforms: MacOS, Windows, Linux

This extension provides an offline viewing mode for Wikipedia dumps (for example, a recent English, compressed backup of all article text (6.3Gb), or any other language or collection).

Read INSTALL below for the quick-starter. Be aware that an indexed Wikipedia dump must be obtained independently in order to install this software.

= Installing = For preconfigured, binary distributions go to http://code.google.com/p/wikipedia-offline-patch/.

Install the "Offline" extension normally, making sure to include the configuration variables below, then take a look in the Special:Offline page for status and diagnostic hints once your system is running.

a) Linux
 * Dependencies:

yum install php xapian-core xapian-bindings php-pecl-apc

b) Windows
 * The windows package comes with all dependencies locally installed, but you might still have to take these steps:

copy zlib1.dll C:\windows\system32\


 * You need the MSVC 2008 Runtime compatibility library.
 * If you are not using the bundled mongoose webserver and php, you will need to include windows/php.ini during php startup.

c) MacOS
 * If you are running MacOS 10.4, you will need to upgrade to php5, installing it into `/usr/local` is recommended. Install the "apc" accelerator and xapian php binding, and enable in `php.ini`.
 * Somehow install the xapian library.
 * You might need to recompile the indexer, or deal with `ld.config` and `ldd`

PHP_CONFIG=/usr/local/php5/bin/php-config XAPIAN_CONFIG=/usr/local/bin/xapian-config ./configure --with-php


 * you also may need to edit "-Wstrict-null-sentinel" out of the configure script.

Your encyclopedia and its index
Install an xml dump of your wikipedia, probably distributed in a file named `pages-articles.xml.bz2`, from a disc or the net. Check with bittorrent networks. Try to download the corresponding index files, in any of formats (well only Xapian for the moment). Otherwise, you will have to generate the index yourself, keep reading. An index is necessary to match a given article with its location in your dumpfiles.

(You can get a small, pre-indexed encyclopedia for testing purposes such as wiki-splits-tl.zip .)

Extract, then either create a link

or rename your database dump directory to `./wiki-splits`

Of course, you can always set the `$wgOfflineWikiPath` variable to point to another directory.

User rights
= Acknowledgements = The current author is Adam Wight, who can be reached through this project page or at adamw on ludd.net.

Thanassis Tsiodras has a great page explaining how to build a working offline wikipedia.

Wikipedia Offline Client was the starting point of the code here.

This software and its source code are licensed as GPL.