Self-Hosting a Copy of Wikipedia with Kiwix

I’m not sure anymore where I got the idea from, but I recently thought it would be nice to host a local copy of Wikipedia.

Luckily, there’s a project exactly for that: Kiwix. It’s extremely simple to get running with Debian, just install it and download a zim file for Wikipedia.

apt-get install kiwix-tools
wget https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_mini_2024-04.zim

Then run kiwix-serve and point it to the zim file:

kiwix-serve --port 8080 wikipedia_en_all_mini_2024-04.zim

Unfortunately, I don’t see an option to listen to a Unix socket instead of a port. I always prefer the socket option, because the ingress goes through a reverse-proxy, anyway.

Systemd

kiwix-tools doesn’t seem to come with a systemd unit, so let’s create one to automatically start it.

[Unit]
Description=Kiwix Serve
After=network.target network-online.target

[Service]
User=skoch
ExecStart=kiwix-serve --port 8080 /home/skoch/wikipedia_en_all_mini_2024-04.zim
Type=simple

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Nginx

To reach Kiwix under the /kiwix path on my home server, I’ve set a forward in nginx like this:

location /kiwix {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/kiwix;
}

I had to pass the additional flag --urlRootLocation /kiwix to Kiwix. Additionally, I’ve limited Kiwix to localhost with --address 127.0.0.1.