Sotoki (Stack Overflow to Kiwix) is an openZIM scraper to create offline versions of Stack Exchange websites such as Stack Overflow.

It is based on Stack Exchange's Data Dumps hosted by The Internet Archive.

Sotoki works off a dump of a StackExchange website, as regularly created by StackExchange team. You must provide a --mirror to use to download this dump and the --domain you want to scrape.

For instance, to download Sports StackExchange website as of August 2024 and based on dump hosted on archive.org, you have to use --mirror https://archive.org/download/stackexchange_20240829 --domain sports.stackexchange.com. Value of mirror is hence continuously updated as new dumps are published by StackExchange team.

Other CLI parameters are mandatory:

• --title: ZIM title, must be less than 30 chars. E.g. Gardening and Landscaping
• --description: ZIM description, must be less than 80 chars

docker run -v my_dir:/output ghcr.io/openzim/sotoki sotoki --help

sotoki is a Python3 software. If you are not using the Docker image, you are advised to use it in a virtual environment to avoid installing software dependencies on your system.

python3 -m venv ./env  # creates a virtual python environment in ./env folder
./env/bin/pip install -U pip  # upgrade pip (package manager). recommended
./env/bin/pip install -U sotoki  # install/upgrade sotoki inside virtualenv

# direct access to in-virtualenv sotoki binary, without shell-attachment
./env/bin/sotoki --help
# alias or link it for convenience
sudo ln -s $(pwd)/env/bin/sotoki /usr/local/bin/

# alternatively, attach virtualenv to shell
source env/bin/activate
sotoki --help
deactivate  # unloads virtualenv from shell

Anybody is welcome to improve the Sotoki.

To run Sotoki off the git repository, you'll need to download a few external dependencies that we pack in Python releases. Just run python src/sotoki/dependencies.py.

See requirements.txt for the list of python dependencies.

You don't have to make your own ZIM files of Stack Exchange's Web sites. Updated ZIM files are built on a regular basis for all of them. Look at https://library.kiwix.org/?category=stack_exchange to download them.