📦 I just discovered .zim files
📆 2026-05-24 15:35
A few days ago I found out about ZIM files. I am surprised I never looked into them earlier. A .zim file is basically a compressed offline version of a website or collection of pages. They're commonly used with Kiwix for things like offline Wikipedia, documentation archives, and other knowledge dumps. The format is designed for fast browsing, indexing, and portability.
What I really liked is that you can create your own offline web archives pretty easily.
The DIY method
I found the wget-2-zim project: Wget-2-zim is a simple bash script with some nifty tricks that can be used to archive websites on the internet. It does not require ServiceWorkers and will drop a ZIM file that can be read with any Kiwix reader anywhere. The script does several things that go very much beyond what wget alone would do. For example it deletes large files and it grabs embedded images and media files from external URLs, it injects anti-cookie-banner CSS and all sorts of other useful things.
The online method: YouZimit
It's a free service ( you can donate if you want ) that crawls websites and emails you a .zim file. The thing is that it's pretty slow and a task cannot last more than 2 hours. So, if you're trying to create an archive for a large site the DIY method with wget-2-zim is better.
There's also official documentation from openZIM:
Build your ZIM file (openZIM wiki)
ZIM Readers
Linux, Windows, OSX or Android ? There's a client. I installed kiwix-desktop on my Arch Linux laptop and it works great.
Reader software for the ZIM file format.
Honestly, this feels like one of those internet tools that should be way more widely known. There are some zim servers also. I will look into that and see if I can help out. The android version of Kiwix has a server...