I’ve been thinking about adding this to my “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself” / SHTF pile. I have a spare 10-15GB for a good selection of basic articles (across sciences, history, pop culture trivia etc).
https://get.kiwix.org/en/solutions/hotspots/content-bundles/
https://get.kiwix.org/en/solutions/hotspots/imager-service/
There’s something inherently cool about having wikipedia in a box (yes, you’d likely need to refresh it once a year) but I’ve never heard of anyone actually self hosting a Kiwix instance.
Yep, and I love it.
I’ve got a little Banana Pi M4 Zero (PiZero form factor but much more powerful and with 4 GB RAM) loaded up with, among other useful tools, Kiwix and the full Wikipedia dump. I just refreshed it with the 2026-02 full dump, so I’m caught up for the year. I’ve also got a lot of other offline docs loaded up (React, Bun, and the devdocs for several libraries I use) and it’s nice to have local copies of those instead of googling every time.
Surprisingly, the full ~130 GB Wikipedia dump works fine on a regular Pi Zero 2 with 512 MB RAM. I don’t know how ZIM works but it does work very very well.
Similar setup here. Orangepi zero that starts kiwix server at boot and switches the wifi to AP mode. Just plug it in, connect to kiwix WiFi, access kiwix.local via phone browser, and shazam.
Nice! Those AllWinner boards are a little tricky to get going and have some quirks, but the price is great for the extra horsepower you get. Granted, I use the latest Armbian since the manufacturer’s images are all quite old.
I actually have a spare pi4 doing nothing, so was thinking of adding this to its jobs list.
130GB for the entire thing? And the pi doesn’t choke on indexing / searching it?
On that: how capable is the search engine (I assume it has one?)
That was my thought. I knew it couldn’t hold it in RAM but thought it would be doing crazy IO and limited by being on SD, but it seems to not be a problem. Like I said, I don’t know how ZIM does it, but it does it well. Must have some kind of index that lets it fast travel to the correct blocks or something. I dunno lol.
Yep, it has search. It’s…okay but kind of primitive. It’s not slow, and if you’re searching for something that’s fairly unique (as far as keywords go), it does well. But if you’re searching something like an acronym where it shows up as a regular word in other entries, it’s a lot more hit or miss.