download-kiwix-zim

Interactive tool to browse and download ZIM files from the Kiwix library.

Features

• Browse all 3,395 offline content archives from the Kiwix catalog
• Filter by language (e.g., English, French, Spanish)
• Interactive selection with fzf (multi-select support)
• Fast parallel downloads with aria2c (4 connections)
• Automatic fallback to wget if aria2c is unavailable
• Human-readable file sizes (GB/MB)
• Preview mode showing language, size, and content type

Installation

The package is available in this Nix flake:

# Build locally
nix build .#download-kiwix-zim

# Run directly
nix run .#download-kiwix-zim

# Install to profile
nix profile install .#download-kiwix-zim

Usage

# Browse all ZIM files
download-kiwix-zim

# Filter by language code
download-kiwix-zim --lang eng

# Download to specific directory
download-kiwix-zim /mnt/gaia/kiwix

# Combine options
download-kiwix-zim --lang fra /mnt/gaia/kiwix

fzf Keybindings

• Tab: Select/deselect item
• Ctrl-A: Select all
• Ctrl-D: Deselect all
• Enter: Confirm and download
• Esc: Cancel

Language Codes

Common language codes:

• eng - English
• fra - French
• spa - Spanish
• deu - German
• por - Portuguese
• ara - Arabic
• zho - Chinese
• jpn - Japanese

Example Output

Fetching Kiwix catalog...
Parsing catalog...
Found 3395 ZIM files

Select ZIM file to download (Tab for multi-select, Enter to confirm)

> Wikipedia [eng] 95.2G maxi
  Wikivoyage [eng] 156M nopic
  Wiktionary [eng] 4.2G maxi
  Stack Exchange [eng] 23.1G all

Dependencies

All dependencies are automatically included in the Nix package:

• Python 3
• fzf (interactive selection)
• aria2c (parallel downloads)
• wget (fallback downloader)

API

Uses the Kiwix OPDS v2 catalog API:

• Endpoint: https://library.kiwix.org/catalog/v2/entries
• Format: OPDS Atom XML feed
• Documentation: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/OPDS