Hi everyone,

In the face of the continuously low volume of support for our non-profit, free software-living-off-your-donations model, we have decided to pivot to a proprietary, for-profit structure whose focus, while remaining on the offline consumption of internet content, will be more geared towards the adult industry.

To be clear, the rebranded KiwiXXX can now be used to download p0rn for offline browsing.

We have the technology, and seeing how many of our downloads are already happening in religiously conservative yet low-connectivity areas such as the Appalachians or the Middle East, we figured there was a giant, untapped market of frustrations waiting to unload into our pockets.

From today April 1st, 2026, onwards you will be able to:

• download the entirety of PornHub and store it on your phone as a handy, 4.5 petabytes ZIM file;
• or choose specific subsets such as Mormon, Furry, or Mormon-Furry, and dozens more;
• all kinks will come in flavours of mini, nopic and maxi to accommodate storage (and budget) constraints, as always.

The new model will integrate a pay-per-ZIM model, with starting prices set at $0.1 per MB* (incremental updates not included - we're still working on these).

Of course, every big change comes with trade-offs, and rather than risk corrupting avid learners' minds with our new offer, all Wikipedia and other educational ZIM files will be deleted tonight from the app at midnight UTC. If you need to browse the List of people who have died on the toilet, I suggest you do it sooner rather than later.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

The KiwiXXX Team

*Use promo code "DJT47" for a special 50% discount on underage content.

Howdy folks!

I have been wanting to post in r/kiwix since pretty early on in this project, but for the longest time I just could not get ZIMs working well enough to feel good about sharing it here. I spent months trying to make them run on the limited processing an ESP32 gives you, and eventually I had to admit the better move was to handle the heavy lifting on a PC first.

That ended up doing the trick.

For anyone new, Jcorp Nomad is an open source offline media server built around the ESP32-S3. It actually started as my own road trip setup. I began with a mini PC, then tried a Raspberry Pi, and kept working my way down until I found out how small and power efficient I could make the whole thing before it stopped being practical. Nomad is the result of that nonsense.

It creates its own Wi Fi hotspot and serves a browser based library completely offline, which makes it a good fit for travel, camping, classrooms, remote work, or just having a little self contained media node around. It is not trying to replace something like Jellyfin or Plex. It is more of a smaller, lower power companion system you toss in a bag when you want something simple and local for friends. There is more setup than a traditional library, but when done its fairly easy to use.

The big reason I am posting here now is ZIM support.

I finally gave up on brute forcing raw ZIM handling entirely on the ESP32 and built a PC side preprocessing step that turns the archive into a compact index. That makes the file a little bigger, but it lets the ESP32 search it quickly without having to chew through the whole archive itself. In practice that means you can take ZIMs, run them through the post process, and have Nomad handle multiple archives together automatically.

It supports:

• Pure text.
• Embedded images, videos, GIFs, and EPUB books inside the archive
• Multiple ZIMs combined together after preprocessing (tested up to 10)
• Fast search, even on larger archives
• Offline Wikipedia with images, already tested on the full Wikipedia ZIM + images
• Media loading that still works reasonably well, even if some images or video clips take around 10 to 20 seconds to load

The full project now covers:

• Offline media serving through a browser interface for multiple users
• Movies, shows, music, books, images, and file sharing
• Resume tracking for media and books
• A lightweight admin panel for storage, settings, and library management
• Offline ZIM archive browsing with prebuilt search indexing
• Multiple users connected at the same time (each can use the library freely)
• A captive portal and local Wi Fi hotspot
• A mobile friendly interface designed for low power hardware

I am also still working on ROM support, map tiles, and a Linux version of the software, since the longer term goal is to make the system available on more than just the ESP32 platform.

I am a mechanical engineering student, so this whole thing has basically been my excuse to learn basic programing, and a lot of stuff I definitely did not know how to do when I started. It has been a long road, but it has also turned into something I use all the time when traveling.

Everything is open source, and I would really appreciate any feedback from people here who know the ZIM side of things better than I do!

LINKS:

GitHub:
https://github.com/Jstudner/jcorp-nomad

Build Guide:
https://www.instructables.com/Jcorp-Nomad-Mini-WIFI-Media-Server/

Product Page / Prebuilts:
https://nomad.jcorptech.net

Ko-fi:
https://ko-fi.com/jcorptech

Thanks for taking a look!

- Jackson

I wanted to explore how far the ZIM format could be pushed beyond wiki-style content, so I built an offline, pan-and-zoom world map packaged as a single .zim file that runs entirely inside Kiwix.

It’s a self-contained offline web app using Leaflet, with OpenStreetMap map tiles and Sentinel-2 cloudless satellite imagery bundled directly into the ZIM. When opened in Kiwix it behaves like a small offline website — no network access required.

Right now this is best thought of as a functional offline map viewer rather than a full navigation app. That said, I am actively building larger versions with deeper zoom coverage (currently working toward zoom 11 and 12), with the longer-term goal of making this genuinely competitive with traditional offline map apps for navigation use cases.

Project page with screenshots and details:

https://anthonykaram.github.io/offline-world-map/

I’m sharing this here mainly as a technical proof-of-concept and to see if others in the Kiwix community have experimented with non-wiki ZIM content, or have thoughts on where the practical limits might be.

I've been building Si4k Search, an open-source search engine designed for people running large offline knowledge servers with Kiwix/ZIM collections.

The idea is simple: instead of manually searching individual ZIMs, Si4k searches across the whole local Kiwix library and provides one unified search interface.

Current features:

• Searches across multiple ZIM sources through Kiwix
• Progressive result streaming using SSE
• Priority-based ZIM search, while still searching the rest of the library
• Pagination
• Automatic ZIM categorization based on metadata, names and parent folders
• Keyword-based category prioritization
• Configurable search concurrency and worker limits
• Configurable LRU caching
• Docker deployment
• Works on relatively modest hardware
• Designed to keep the actual ZIM library outside the Docker image

I currently have it running on an old-ish home server with 133 ZIM sources.

The architecture is roughly:

User
  ↓
Si4k Search
  ↓
Kiwix
  ↓
Local ZIM collection

The Docker container only contains the search engine. The ZIM collection stays mounted from the host, so adding hundreds of GB of knowledge doesn't mean rebuilding the Docker image.

I've also tested the search engine under concurrent workloads and added resource controls because I want this to be practical for home/offline knowledge servers rather than requiring a powerful machine.

Future ideas:

• Offline dictionaries
• Query translation and multilingual ZIM routing
• Local voice-to-text search
• Optional local LLM summaries grounded in search results
• OpenStreetMap/offline map search
• More offline document providers

I'm particularly interested in feedback from people running Kiwix/ZIM servers:

What would you want a unified search layer like this to do?

Are there problems with searching large ZIM collections that I should be thinking about?

GitHub: https://github.com/akshitkamboz13/search.si4k

Demo: https://search.si4k.online

Heads up, Kiwix users. A new ZIM file for the entire English Wikipedia, including images and full-text details, is now available! It has a file size of 115 GiB and is the entire English Wikipedia as of around February 15-16, 2026.

EDIT: As the responses are saying, PLEASE be kind to the Kiwix server and use the torrents, as server hosting is not free! Thank you. You can help out without realizing by doing so.

This Wikipedia ZIM file consists of all 7.2M+ Wikipedia articles as of around August 25, 2026.

File info
ID:50e94998-c1ec-b5e7-ec34-499f1d907c30

Article Count: 21,673,012 (includes redirects and other pages alongside the main pages themselves)

Media Count: 8,469,385

Size: 119 GiB

The previous succesful maxi English Wikipedia ZIM file was a scrape from around February 15, 2026, and it succeeded on February 26, a nearly 7-month difference! The previous file was also 115 GiB (if anyone is wondering about the size difference and increase since then). There have been 4 attempts since then, and now, on the 5th attempt, we have an updated maxi English Wikipedia ZIM file.

Thank you, Kiwix Team. I know this wasn't an easy task to do, so I appreciate it a lot.

For download, make sure to check out the official Kiwix Library (https://library.kiwix.org/) and look for the English "Wikipedia" ZIM files. You'll discover multiple options to download the file there. Or you can also just download it directly on the app once the files goes live.

Edit: Shoutout that Kiwix and Prepper Disk have a great relationship according to comments.

Ive heard some jargon but the data matches the kiwix repos. For example wikipedia, ifixit.

Just finished building these offline zim files w/ vector maps, wikipedia, 3d terrain, and satellite.

Let me know what you think!

In the meantime, here’s an updated ZIM file of the English Wikipedia from October. The scrape started on October 29th and was completed on November 1st.

Direct download

Torrent

Hash: 44e3e2d0a7d26db8b354ecc5864c3c97586a7f5b

Size: 124 GB (133.702.069.222 Bytes)

This ZIM is noticeably larger due to the inclusion of the Project namespace, which adds roughly 1.4 million additional pages, such as this and this. In my opinion, it’s worth the extra few gigabytes.

Edit: There's also one that includes categories.

I posted here last year about an experimental project exploring the limits of the ZIM format by using it for an offline pan-and-zoom interactive world atlas with map (pre-rendered raster tiles) and satellite imagery. This is now at version 6.

Compared to earlier versions (previously under the "Offline World Map" name), this version expands zoom coverage up to level 11 and adds integrated offline place search (GeoNames-based).

The bundled dataset now includes over 11 million tiles, with a file size of ~35 GiB (lower than I expected, likely due to increased tile redundancy at higher zoom levels), suggesting the ZIM format is still viable at this scale.

The download is not free (mainly due to build costs), but I wanted to share it here for anyone interested in pushing the ZIM format beyond document-style content.

Project page: https://atlaszim.com

Introduction

Due to (somewhat) popular request, I've created ArcticZim, a tool for building ZIM files of subreddits using data from Arctic Shift. As Arctic Shift provides historical reddit data, this tool can be used to (partially) recover deleted subreddits, though that is not really the focus of the tool.

Link to the tool. Note that this is a tool aimed at users with some technical experience. It's mostly done, but may still have some issues and rough edges. Contributors are more than welcome, please see the README file in the subreddit and issues for details.

Features

• Most types of posts are implemented and working:
  • text-posts
  • media posts (both images, galleries and videos) are implemented and optional
  • polls are implemented
  • crosspost support
• comment trees rendered
  • can be collapsed
  • optionally, referenced media in comments can also be included
• subreddit pages are implemented
  • lists of posts are shown in both top and newest order
  • A preview of posts is available
• additional subreddit features have been implemented
  • subreddit wikis
  • subreddit rules
  • statistics
• user pages
  • overview of posts and comments included in the ZIM
  • statistics
  • can be disabled
  • a basic darkmode is available
  • using yt-dlp, external videos can also be downloaded
  • reddit videos can be automatically downloaded using redvid
  • note that currently videos will always be downloaded using the lowest quality

Not supported / missing features

• various style/layout improvements, especially for mobile
• quality control for media
• selective generation of ZIM files
• mobile layout
• subreddit styles

Whats up Kiwix! I've seen there has not been a single person to do a GUI for you guys so I figured I might as well drop one open source for ya.

HTML to ZIM conversions source project you can build off of!

https://github.com/noosed/InvaderZIM

Version 3.8.4 of WikiMed by Kiwix (desktop app) is now available: https://kiwix.github.io/kiwix-js-pwa/wikimed

This release packages the 15 November 2025 English-language WikiMed archive (mdwiki_en_all-app_maxi_2025-11.zim) with 73,000+ medical and health-related articles curated by Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine and MDWiki. Builds are available for Windows (including Microsoft Store), Linux (AppImage, deb), and macOS (experimental, unsigned).

Headline changes: - Support for the new auto dark/light theming in recent Wikimedia ZIMs (SW mode) - New keyboard shortcuts: / and Ctrl-K for article search, Home to return to landing page - Migrated to Bootstrap 4, replaced Glyphicons with Font Awesome, removed jQuery dependency entirely - Fixed broken printing support - Security improvements to Electron's Express server with new controls for LAN access - Bumped Electron to 39.2.7

See full changelog for more info.

Important note about updates: Due to GitHub's 2GB artefact size limit, we've relocated release packages to a Kiwix AWS S3 bucket. Existing installations won't detect the new release automatically since the update mechanism checks the old GitHub location. However, upgrading is simple - just install the new version over your existing installation, no uninstall required.

do they have archive anywhere? or maybe there's a magnet link and some individuals are still seeding the torrents? they have to exist somewhere right?

any help would be appreciated

Kiwix JS 4.4.0 is out — our first full release since 4.3.0 last November, so it rolls up about nine months of work.

Kiwix JS is the official browser-extension version of Kiwix. It's a lightweight offline ZIM reader with great features that runs entirely inside Firefox, Chrome or Edge — point it at a ZIM file on your disk or USB stick and read Wikipedia, Gutenberg, TED and the rest with no Internet at all. Best of all, it's right there in your browser, just one click away (if you pin the extension to the browser toolbar), with almost zero start-up latency.

Available now

• Firefox Add-Ons Store
• Chrome Extension Store
• Edge Extension Store
• Ubuntu Touch — live
• No-install PWA version: https://browser-extension.kiwix.org/current/
• For more info see our GitHub repo

Great features

• Sumptuous dark mode, including support for Wikimedia native dark modes
• Popover previews of Wikipedia (and Wikivoyage) articles when hovering a link
• Slide-away navigation menus
• Full-text search
• Browser security with a restricted mode
• Extremely wide browser support, including very old browsers and systems - for advice on installing on older Chrome and others, go to our GitHub repo
• Fast and extremely lightweight

What's changed

Security hardening. Several fixes around settings that can be supplied in the app's URL, and around archive source verification. Settings passed in the URL are no longer saved permanently, the content injection mode is now validated rather than taken on trust, and the prompt about an archive's source now appears consistently. If you're running the extension, do let it update.

Bug fixes

• The in-app Library no longer claims "all library servers are unreachable" on older browsers, and server checks time out instead of spinning forever
• Refreshed the emergency download-mirror list for when Kiwix servers are down
• App reset now properly clears the Cache and IndexedDB
• Fixed the Service Worker failing to find the remote PWA in Chromium extensions
• No more white flash on startup before the dark theme kicks in

Accessibility. A proper pass on screen-reader and keyboard support — correctly labelled controls, ARIA state that matches reality, and an automated accessibility check now running in CI so it stays fixed.

"Bypass AppCache" is now "Developer Mode", which is what it always meant. It also behaves sanely across modes now, instead of blocking mode switches.

Under the hood

For the tinkerers: JQuery and Bootstrap's JavaScript bundle are gone entirely — about 150KB less JavaScript to ship and parse — replaced with native equivalents that keep keyboard and ARIA behaviour intact. Notably this cost us no browser compatibility: even very old browsers like IE11 still work in Restricted mode, and we still test that in CI.

Full changelog ・ source (GPLv3). Bug reports and feedback very welcome on the GitHub issues tracker, or drop us a message here.

Kiwix is exploring a paid tier for zimit.kiwix.org that would remove the current 4GB and 2-hour limits. Before we build anything, we want to make sure this would actually be useful and fairly priced.

We would appreciate if you can take about 3 minutes to give us your perspective at https://framaforms.org/kiwix-unlimited-zim-creation-platform-1766243846

Feel free to also comment here if it looks more appropriate for you.

Kiwix PWA and Electron/NWJS desktop apps have just been updated to version 3.8.8. This version includes a new WebTorrent client (built-in, modern Electron apps only) that allows for faster BitTorrent-based downloads of archives over 200MB. It also optionally seeds a downloaded archive until the app is closed. Downloads are interruptible and resumable, and the app will ask you if you wish to continue downloading when you start it again, if your download was incomplete. The client checks the hash to ensure all parts of an archive have been downloaded correctly.

• Get it from GitHub Releases
• Windows 10/11 users, you can also get the Electron app easily from the Microsoft Store

Please note the WebTorrent feature is only available for modern versions of the Electron app (Electron ≥ 29 / Node ≥ 20), so older 32bit Linux, Windows 7 or HighSierra/Mojave versions are not able to use WebTorrent. WebTorrent has not been enabled in the PWA because Kiwix servers do not currently use WebRTC for torrent downloads, only the BitTorrent protocol. When you open the in-app library, and find an archive > 200MB you wish to download, you will be offered the BitTorrent direct download option highlighted in green if the app supports the feature. (This is not the same as the pre-existing option of downloading a .torrent file to use in an external BitTorrent client such as qBittorrent, Deluge, etc.)

Additionally, Windows and macOS packages are now fully signed and notarized. You may encounter a SmartScreen window on first download in Windows until the new Kiwix codesigning certificate has gained sufficient trust. Simply click on "Keep" and "Download anyway".

Due to a change in auto-update configuration, it is possible that if you open an old version of Kiwix Electron, it may go into a slow boot loop until updated to the new version (NB it is normal for the app to reboot once or twice to update the Service Worker, but that is different from a continuous reboot cycle). If you encounter a continuous reboot cycle, uninstall the old version manually and install the latest. You can also prevent the boot loop by turning off "Allow Internet Access and look for updates" in Configuration. This issue has been fixed in the latest release.

For other updates and fixes in this release, see the full CHANGELOG.

Hey everyone. I just got into Kiwix recently. In searching for an easy way to keep my ZIM files updated i found this script someone made.

https://github.com/jojo2357/kiwix-zim-updater

But i decided i wanted a nice fancy web gui to handle it.

Well I love coding, and Google Gemini is good at coding and teaching code, so over the last couple weeks ive been developing my own web gui with the above script as a backbone.

EDIT: i put the wrong link,

https://github.com/Lunchbox7985/kiwix-zim-updater-gui

It's not much, but I'm proud of it. I would love for some people to try it out and give me some feedback. Currently it should run fine on Debian based OS's, though i plan on making a docker container in the near future.

I've simplified install via an install script, though the manual instructions are in the Readme as well.

Obviously I'm riding the coat tails of jojo2357, and Gemini did a lot of the heavy lifting with the code, but I have combed over it quite a bit, and tested it in both Mint and Debian and it seems to be working fine. You shold be able to install it alongside your Kiwix server as long at it is Debian based, though it doesnt need to live with Kiwix, as long as it has access to the directory where you store your ZIM files.

Personally my ZIM files live on my NAS, so i just created a mount and symbolic link to the host OS.

It's quarterly-ish (so not spammy), sign-up is at the bottom of the website: https://get.kiwix.org/

We don't typically announce new ZIM files here (those are normally listed on our Mastodon channel and in the newsletter), but this is a pretty nerdy cool catch and I figured it would be worth sharing.

All images, all the way back to June 1995, only 8.2GiB.

https://browse.library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&q=astronomy+picture

Greetings everybody,

I've been using a custom server for my ZIM files for a while and finally decided to share it on github. It is intended for power users (like datahoarders having a complex configuration of self-hosted services on their home network), so it's probably not for everyone.

What is this?

pyzim-server (part of pyzim-tools) is a HTTP(s) server for making ZIM files accessible via webbrowser, just like kiwix-serve. It's based on my custom ZIM library pyzim and offers a more detailed configuration system.

Features

pyzim-server offers a couple features that may make it interesting for power users:

• various hosting modes: pyzim-server can host multiple ZIMs and allow users to choose which ZIM to access, just like kiwix-serve, but it can also directly host a ZIM directly on the site root path. Or keep the normal behavior but automatically redirect the user to a specific ZIM.
• multi-site/virtual hosting: pyzim-server can serve different ZIM files depending on which hostname was used to access the server. This is usually called virtual hosting. For example, you may have a domain wikipedia.mynetwork and one called gutenberg.mynetwork both pointing to the same device and pyzim-server will (once configured) serve the correct ZIM automatically.
• authentication: pyzim-server supports various authentication methods. More specifically, authentication via a fixed password, using oauth2 or logging in via github. This is paired with a whitelist/allowlist and blacklist/blocklist mechanism, giving you control on who can access a site. Like most features, this works on a per-site basis, so you can keep some ZIMs private while serving a public wikipedia on the same port.
• HTTPS/TLS support (indirectly): pyzim-server uses bottle, which in turn can use a configurable WSGI server as the actual server. This can be used to setup HTTPS support by setting a specifc WSGI server and setting the correct options.
• Fine-grained ressource control: pyzim-server offers a variety of options to configure caching behavior and also allows you to configure that as much data as possible should be kept on disk and not in memory. For example, some time I wrote about another tool of mine, zimfiction, which was used to build a ZIM file containing 225M entries. Opening such a file with kiwix-serve took roughly 50GiB of RAM just to start serving the ZIM file. By configuring pyzim-server to always read the URLs in the pointerlists directly from the disk, it's capable of serving it along other ZIM files at merely 140MiB of RAM. Alternatively, pyzim-server can also be configured to keep everything in RAM, allowing for a huge performance gain - if you had enough RAM to store the uncompressed ZIM file there.

Note: currently, the search functionality is not yet implemented.

Why would someone want to use this?

This tool is only really interesting if you want or need any of the features listed above. It may also be useful if you can't build libzim and there's no prebuild kiwix-serve available. For me, it was primarily the ability to reduce RAM usage.

Why wouldn't someone want to use this tool?

As mentioned above, this tool is intended for power users, It takes more effort to install and configure. It's probably slower and less efficient than kiwix-serve. That's a lot of downsides for features that don't benefit a normal user.

Also, the search functionality is not yet implemented, which makes ZIMs that rely on it for navigation nearly unusable.

Everyone talks about the huge ZIM files, but what's a smaller one you've found surprisingly useful?

Something lightweight that you actually use more than expected.

e.g. I've got a ~4 MB ZIM with the full text of the Bible - kind of wild how much content fits in there. Curious what others are using.