Various ZIM command line tools. More information about the ZIM format and the openZIM project.
Most famous 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 tools are provided as well but are of less value for most of the usages.
This document assumes you have a little knowledge about software compilation. If you experience difficulties with the dependencies or with the ZIM libary compilation itself, we recommend to have a look to kiwix-build.
- ZIM (package
libzim-dev
on Debian/Ubuntu) - docopt.cpp (package
libdocopt-dev
on Debian/Ubuntu) - Mustache (package
libkainjow-mustache-dev
on Debian/Ubuntu) Be sure you use Mustache version 4.1 or above. You can just copy the headermustache.hpp
somewhere it can be found by the compiler and/or set CPPFLAGS with correct-I
option.
zimwriterfs
relies on many third-party software libraries. They are
prerequisites to compiling zimwriterfs. The following libraries
need to be available:
- Magic (package
libmagic-dev
on Debian/Ubuntu) - Z (package
zlib1g-dev
on Debian/Ubuntu) - Gumbo (package
libgumbo-dev
on Debian/Ubuntu) - ICU (package
libicu-dev
on Debian/Ubuntu)
These dependencies may or may not be packaged by your operating system. They may also be packaged but only in an older version. The compilation script will tell you if one of them is missing or too old. In the worst case, you will have to download and compile a more recent version by hand.
If you want to install these dependencies locally, then ensure that
meson (through pkg-config
) will properly find them.
The ZIM tools build using Meson version 0.43 or higher. Meson relies itself on Ninja, pkg-config and few other compilation tools.
Install first the few common compilation tools:
- Meson
- Ninja
- Pkg-config
These tools should be packaged if you use a cutting edge operating system. If not, have a look to the Troubleshooting section.
Once all dependencies are installed, you can compile ZIM tools with:
meson . build
ninja -C build
By default, it will compile dynamic linked libraries. All binary files
will be created in the "build" directory created automatically by
Meson. If you want statically linked libraries, you can add
-Dstatic-linkage=true
option to the Meson command.
Depending of you system, ninja
may be called ninja-build
.
To run the automated tests:
cd build
meson test
To compile and run the tests, Google
Test is requested (package
googletest
on Ubuntu).
If you want to install the ZIM tools you just have compiled on your system, here we go:
ninja -C build install
You might need to run the command as root (or using 'sudo'), depending where you want to install the libraries. After the installation succeeded, you may need to run ldconfig (as root).
If you want to uninstall the ZIM tools:
ninja -C build uninstall
Like for the installation, you might need to run the command as user
root
(or using sudo
).
A Docker image with zimwriterfs
, zimcheck
,zimdump
and all the
other tools can be built from the docker
directory. The project
maintains an official image available at https://ghcr.io/openzim/zim-tools.
If you need to install Meson "manually":
virtualenv -p python3 ./ # Create virtualenv
source bin/activate # Activate the virtualenv
pip3 install meson # Install Meson
hash -r # Refresh bash paths
If you need to install Ninja "manually":
git clone git://github.com/ninja-build/ninja.git
cd ninja
git checkout release
./configure.py --bootstrap
mkdir ../bin
cp ninja ../bin
cd ..
If the compilation still fails, you might need to get a more recent version of a dependency than the one packaged by your Linux distribution. Try then with a source tarball distributed by the problematic upstream project or even directly from the source code repository.