XOWA is an offline Wikipedia application that lets you run Wikipedia on your computer.
- Run a complete copy of English Wikipedia from your computer.
- Display 5.0+ million articles in full HTML formatting.
- Show images within an article. Access 4.0+ million images using the offline image databases.
- Set up over 800+ other wikis including: English Wiktionary, English Wikisource, English Wikiquote, English Wikivoyage, Non-English wikis (French Wiktionary, German Wikisource, Dutch Wikivoyage), Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and many more.
- Update your wiki whenever you want, using Wikimedia's database backups.
- Navigate between offline wikis. Click on "Look up this word in Wiktionary" and instantly view the page in Wiktionary.
- Edit articles to remove vandalism or errors.
- Install to a flash memory card for portability to other machines.
- Run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. (Android Alpha available)
- Run as an HTTP server to browse from Firefox, Chrome or Safari
- View the HTML source for any wiki page.
- Search for any page by title using a Wikipedia-like Search box. Search across wikis as well.
- Browse pages by alphabetical order using Special:AllPages.
- Find a word on a page.
- Access a history of viewed pages.
- Bookmark your favorite pages.
- Preview articles by hovering over links
- Customize any one of over 50 options
XOWA is written in Java and requires 1.7 or above.
- Download xowa_app_your_operating_system_name.zip from https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/releases/
- Unzip to any folder on your hard drive (or flash memory card)
- Run XOWA
- On '''Windows''', double-click '''C:\xowa\xowa_64.exe'''
- On '''Linux''', open a terminal and run
sh /home/your_user_name/xowa/xowa_linux_64.sh
- On '''OS X''', open a terminal and run
sh /Users/your_user_name/xowa/xowa_macosx_64.sh
Compilation instructions (Command-line)
- Copy-paste https://github.com/gnosygnu/xowa/blob/master/xowa_get_and_make.sh to a plain-text file; EX: /cygdrive/c/xowa_dev/xowa_get_and_make.sh
- Adjust these environment variables to your system: PLAT_NAME, ROOT_DIR, ANT_BINARY, JAVA_JDK_DIR
- cd to your ROOT_DIR
- Run the file using "sh xowa_get_and_make.sh"
- Run the xowa_dev.jar
- (Windows) java -jar xowa_dev.jar
- (Linux) SWT_GTK3=0 && java -jar xowa_dev.jar
- (Mac OS X) java -Xmx256m -d64 -XstartOnFirstThread -jar xowa_dev.jar
Compilation instructions (ANT command-line)
- Download the latest XOWA app package for your operating system. For example, if you're on a 64-bit Linux system, "xowa_app_linux_64_v1.9.5.1.zip".
- Unzip the XOWA app package to a directory. For the sake of simplicity, these instructions assume this directory is "/xowa/"
- Review your directories. You should have the following:
- An XOWA jar: "/xowa/xowa_linux_64.jar"
- An XOWA "/bin/any/" directory with several jar files. For example, "/xowa/bin/any/java/apache/commons-compress-1.5.jar"
- An XOWA "/bin/linux_64/" directory with an SWT jar: "/xowa/bin/linux_64/swt/swt.jar"
- Download the latest XOWA source archive. For example: "xowa_source_v1.9.5.1.7z"
- Unzip the source to "/xowa/dev". When you're done, you'll have a file called "/xowa/dev/build.xml" as well as others
- NOTE: if you're not on a Linux 64-bit system, overwrite the swt jar at "/xowa/dev/150_gfui/lib/swt.jar" with the copy from your "/bin/OS" directory. For example, if you're on a 64 bit Windows system, replace "/xowa/dev/150_gfui/lib/swt.jar" with "/bin/windows_64/swt/swt.jar"
- Open up a console, and run "ant -buildfile build.xml -Dplat_name=linux_64"
IDE instructions (Eclipse)
The '''xowa_source.7z''' was built with Eclipse Indigo. There are no OS dependencies, nor are there dependencies on Eclipse.
- Follow the steps in these two sections from above:
- Setup the XOWA app
- Setup the XOWA source
- Launch Eclipse. Choose a workbench folder of "/xowa/dev"
- If the projects don't load, do File -> Import -> Existing Projects Into Workspace
- Select all projects. Do File -> Refresh.
- Right-click on 400_xowa in the Package Explorer. Select Debug As -> Java Application. Select Xowa_main. XOWA should launch.
- Right-click on 400_xowa in the Package Explorer. Select Debug As -> JUnit Test. All tests should pass.
Eclipse-specific settings
This section documents specific project customizations that differ from the standard Eclipse defaults.
Resource -> Text file encoding -> Other -> UTF-8
These settings are available under Window -> Preferences
- Disable Spelling
- General -> Editors -> Text Editors -> Spelling
*Ignore Warnings
- Java -> Compiler -> Errors/Warnings
- Annotations -> Unhandled token in '@SuppressWarnings'
- Potential programming problems -> Serializable class without serialVersionUID
- Generic Types -> Unnecessary generic type operation (In Eclipse Luna: "Unchecked generic type operation")
- Generic Types -> Usage of a raw type
- Unnecessary Code -> Unused import
- Configuration arguments
- Run -> Debug Configurations -> Arguments
--root_dir /xowa/ --show_license n --show_args n
XOWA is licensed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL) Version 3,
or alternatively under the terms of the Apache License Version 2.0.
See LICENSE.txt for more information.