Whole website downloader

Question

How do you download a static copy of a website? I mean, not loading scripts and using them later when you load the "offline" page, but saving the DOM as it is AFTER all the scripts made changes to the page, so next time you load the website it doesn't ping other websites for anything, and the version you see on that HTML is what was saved from the scanning, not what the scripts generated a second time, in the viewer's computer.

That might be the definition of offline, but I guess I'm also looking for offline, static and dumb.

Answer 1

I don't know if it is what you are looking for but here is a great software you should look at: HTTrack Website Copier. I don't use it a lot but from what I saw up to date it is working great, download the website. Also, I checked it with Norton and it is virus safe.

Answer 2

A PhantomJS script can do the "saving the DOM as it is AFTER all the scripts made changes to the page" thing, but this example doesn't address the other parts of the problem, such as saving images locally.

var page = require('webpage').create();
var fs = require('fs');

var url = 'https://www.google.com/';

page.open(url, function(status) { // Load the web-page

    setInterval(function()        // Give any scripts a few seconds to mess around with the page's structure
    {
        console.log(status);

        page.render('page.png');  // Save web-page as an image - in case you *really* want offline, static and dumb ;-)

        // Get the content of the page
        var html = page.evaluate(function() {
            return document.documentElement.outerHTML;
        });

        // Save the content of the page
        fs.write('./index.html', html, 'w');

        phantom.exit();

    }, 3000);
});

Answer 3

You may look for the following formats:

• MAFF - a web page archiving format provided by Firefox through an extension
• MHTML - web page archive format used to combine in a single document the HTML code

To use these formats, try installing Mozilla Archive Format add-on which saves all the resources in a single ZIP file (MAFF), so you can return to the original site you saved a page from. It also supports MHT (MHTML) files.

Answer 4

Give HTTrack Website Copier a try. I've used it and it is really good. Never needed to try another software for this purpose. If you want to keep options at hand, have a look here. Good Luck! :)