Kiwix Server

What is Kiwix ?

Kiwix is an offline reader for online content like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access. The software as well as the content is free to use for anyone.

What is Kiwix Tools ?

The Kiwix tools is a collection of Kiwix related command line tools:

• kiwix-manage: Manage XML based library of ZIM files
• kiwix-search: Full text search in ZIM files
• kiwix-serve: HTTP daemon serving ZIM files

Dependencies

The Kiwix tools rely on a few third party software libraries. They are prerequisites to the Kiwix tools compilation. Therefore, following libraries need to be available:

• libkiwix (package libkiwix on Debian/Ubuntu)
• libzim (package libzim 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. They may be also packaged but without providing a static version. The compilation script will tell you if one of them is missing or too old. In the worse case, you will have to download and compile bleeding edge version by hand.

If you want to install these dependencies locally, then use the kiwix-tools directory as install prefix.

If you want to compile Kiwix tools statically, the dependencies should be compiled statically (provide a lib...a library), for example by using --enable-static with ./configure.

Environment

The Kiwix tools build using Meson version 0.43 or higher. Meson relies itself on Ninja, pkg-config and a few other compilation tools. Install them first:

• 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.

Compilation

Once all dependencies are installed, you can compile Kiwix tools with:

meson . build
ninja -C build

By default, it will compile dynamic linked libraries. 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.

Installation

If you want to install the Kiwix tools, here we go:

ninja -C build install

You might need to run the command as root (or using sudo), depending on where you want to install the Kiwix tools. After the installation succeeded, you may need to run ldconfig (as root).

Uninstallation

If you want to uninstall the Kiwix tools:

ninja -C build uninstall

Like for the installation, you might need to run the command as root (or using sudo).

Docker

An official Docker image of the Kiwix tools can be found on GHCR. A kiwix-serve dedicated Docker image exists too.

Troubleshooting

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.