Question

I am trying to make MDN's Javascript Reference available for offline browsing (personal use).
I am not the website's owner nor developer, and I can only access its generated output.

My first thought was to inject an HTML5 appcache.manifest in the page ; Using manifestR I have generated a list of the page's assets.
Then I've tried pointing to my local manifest file using the file:/// protocol, using the http:// protocol and finally using a base64 string, representing the file's contents (data:text/cache-manifest,). Nothing seems to work.

After googling a bit, I stumbled upon their public FTP. Haven't fully crawled it yet. But still didn't find any mentions of the js docs.


I have considered saving the HTML pages using the browser's Save As command; But I would rather develop a javascript-based crawler than saving every single page separately.

Where can I find an offline version of MDN Docs ? Or how can I browse MDN docs while being offline ?

Was it helpful?

Solution

Download it at https://mdn-downloads.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/developer.mozilla.org.tar.gz

The "Downloading content" section of About MDN provides the above link (for a tarball download) along with guidance on other ways to access the MDN content, both as single pages and via third-party tools.

And others : don't mirror with wget & co, this is putting un-needed pressure on the website and hinders other users. At least make sure https://developer.mozilla.org/robots.txt (which asks for gentle throttling) is properly handled. Wget does not handle this for instance (http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?30999).

OTHER TIPS

The JavaScript docs along with most of MDN's web reference pages are available on DevDocs.

The app is open source and can be run offline: https://github.com/Thibaut/devdocs

It's easy to set up and doesn't require scraping MDN.

This looks fairly promising: https://github.com/rgarcia/dochub

It's an all-in-one documentation site which can be installed on your own computer (requires node), containing data from a number of standard web references including MDN. It contains a screen scraper component that extracts the info from MDN, and updates it fairly quickly (at least a lot faster than the wget mirror command mentioned above). I haven't confirmed how complete the docs are as scraped, but at first glance they look pretty good.

If you have a Mac, Dash (http://kapeli.com/dash) has docsets generated from the Mozilla Developer Network, including JavaScript. You can also avoid using Dash by downloading the docset directly from http://kapeli.com/feeds/JavaScript.tgz.

download wget and use it to mirror the doc :

wget -m -p https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference

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