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kiwix-library

The Kiwix books you chose -- Wikipedia, WikiMed, Stack Exchange -- pinned and verified

What it does

Downloads the Kiwix books you choose -- single-file offline copies of Wikipedia, WikiMed, WikEM, Wikivoyage, Amateur Radio Stack Exchange, Appropedia, iFixit and others, 27 in the catalog's list -- checks each against the size and sha256 the catalog pinned, and keeps them under /usr/local/share/hammunition/data/kiwix-library/. hammunition reference books lists them with their sizes and licences.

Why you would want it

When the network is down the questions are not: how to treat a wound, what a part does, how an antenna matches, where a road goes. These are the answers, on the laptop before they are needed. EmComm Tools OS fetches one Wikipedia file unverified into every new home directory; this fetches what you choose, once, checked.

Before it will work

Choose books first, by id: hammunition station set --reference-books ham.stackexchange.com_en_all,wikipedia_en_medicine_nopic. A reader: kiwix-tools (for hammunition reference serve) or kiwix. Disk space: each book is counted twice while it installs (the checked download, then the installed copy; the download is deleted after).

How it installs

  • Kiwix books chosen in station config, each pinned in catalog/data/kiwix-pins.yaml and licensed as catalog/data/kiwix-books.yaml states, printed in the plan

Known problems

Books are large: the ham Stack Exchange is 76 MB, WikiMed 163 MB to 2.2 GB by flavour, English Wikipedia 14.4 GB (introductions only) to 127 GB (with pictures). The plan prints each book's size and licence before anything downloads. Nothing Kiwix publishes is signed; the pin freezes what TLS to download.kiwix.org delivered when it was made. Kiwix keeps two dated files per book, so a pin goes about two publications after it was made: the plan then refuses the book, naming the regeneration, and never takes the newer file in its place. Licences differ by book and the plan states each: iFixit is CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, non-commercial; the Wikimedia books are CC BY-SA 4.0 for text with media individually licensed; the US federal books are public domain by class, not verified page by page.

Keeping it current

  • probe: kiwix
  • strategy: reinstall
  • Kiwix republishes a book every few months and keeps only the two newest dated files, so a pin dies about two publications after it is made. The weekly pin review runs scripts/gen_kiwix_pins.py --check; regenerate with scripts/gen_kiwix_pins.py. hammunition update --upstream warns about a chosen book's pin before it goes.

Where to get help with the software itself

The Kiwix project (https://kiwix.org/) for the files; each book's own publisher for its content.

Source: catalog/packages/kiwix-library.yaml