Zimit is a scraper allowing to create ZIM file from any Web site.
zimit:1.0, that's mostly kiwix-android and kiwix-serve. Note that service workers have protocol restrictions as well so you'll need to run it either from localhost or over HTTPS.
This version of Zimit runs a single-site headless-Chrome based crawl in a Docker container and produces a ZIM of the crawled content.
The system extends the crawling system in Browsertrix Crawler and converts the crawled WARC files to ZIM using warc2zim
The zimit.py is the entrypoint for the system.
After the crawl is done, warc2zim is used to write a zim to the
/output directory, which can be mounted as a volume.
Using the --keep flag, the crawled WARCs will also be kept in a temp directory inside /output
zimit is intended to be run in Docker.
To build locally run:
docker build -t openzim/zimit .The image accepts the following parameters:
--url URL- the url to be crawled (required)--workers N- number of crawl workers to be run in parallel--wait-until- Puppeteer setting for how long to wait for page load. See page.goto waitUntil options. The default isload, but for static sites,--wait-until domcontentloadedmay be used to speed up the crawl (to avoid waiting for ads to load for example).--name- Name of ZIM file (defaults to the hostname of the URL)--output- output directory (defaults to/output)--limit U- Limit capture to at most U URLs--exclude <regex>- skip URLs that match the regex from crawling. Can be specified multiple times. An example is--exclude="(\?q=|signup-landing\?|\?cid=)", where URLs that contain either?q=orsignup-landing?or?cid=will be excluded.--scroll [N]- if set, will activate a simple auto-scroll behavior on each page to scroll for upto N seconds--keep- if set, keep the WARC files in a temp directory inside the output directory
The following is an example usage. The --cap-add and --shm-size
flags are needed to run Chrome in Docker.
Example command:
docker run -v /output:/output --cap-add=SYS_ADMIN --cap-add=NET_ADMIN \
--shm-size=1gb openzim/zimit zimit --url URL --name myzimfile --workers 2 --waitUntil domcontentloadedThe puppeteer-cluster provides monitoring output which is enabled by default and prints the crawl status to the Docker log.
Note: Image automatically filters out a large number of ads by using the 3 blocklists from anudeepND. If you don't want this filtering, disable the image's entrypoint in your container (docker run --entrypoint="" openzim/zimit ...).
A first version of a generic HTTP scraper was created in 2016 during the Wikimania Esino Lario Hackathon.
That version is now considered outdated and archived in 2016
branch.