kiwix-serve

The Kiwix tools is a collection of Kiwix related command line tools:

• kiwix-manage: Manage XML based library of ZIM files
• kiwix-search: Full text search in ZIM files
• kiwix-serve: HTTP daemon serving ZIM files

Disclaimer

This document assumes you have a little knowledge about software compilation. If you experience difficulties with the dependencies or with the Kiwix tools compilation itself, we recommend to have a look to kiwix-build.

Preamble

Although the Kiwix tools can be compiled/cross-compiled on/for many systems, the following documentation explains how to do it on POSIX ones. It is primarily thought for GNU/Linux systems and has been tested on recent releases of Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora.

Dependencies

The Kiwix tools rely on a few third party software libraries. They are prerequisites to the Kiwix tools compilation. Therefore, following libraries need to be available:

• libkiwix (package libkiwix on Debian/Ubuntu)
• libzim (package libzim on Debian/Ubuntu)

These dependencies may or may not be packaged by your operating system. They may also be packaged but only in an older version. They may be also packaged but without providing a static version. The compilation script will tell you if one of them is missing or too old. In the worse case, you will have to download and compile bleeding edge version by hand.

If you want to install these dependencies locally, then use the kiwix-tools directory as install prefix.

If you want to compile Kiwix tools statically, the dependencies should be compiled statically (provide a lib...a library), for example by us