How do I download MDN JavaScript documentation for offline use? [closed]

Asked 29/2, 2012 at 15:28 Answered 4/10, 2021 at 0:55

Solved javascript html mozilla offline-browsing

I am trying to make MDN's Javascript Reference available for offline browsing (personal use). To spare me from running some sort of web crawler program or saving individual pages to create a local copy, does Mozilla make an offline version of their documentation available for download? If so, where can I download it?

Towne answered 29/2, 2012 at 15:28 Comment(4)

There is currently no offline version of the MDN docs and you can stop crawling the FTP server - you won't find it there. Exporting the docs for offline use is planned for the next MDN version but I'm not sure how far along that one is. – Dab 1/3, 2012 at 5:45

As @WladimirPalant mentioned, this is planned. See also: original suggestion and the associated bug. – Eye 28/3, 2012 at 13:38

MDN offline copy. github.com/mozilla/kuma – Smother 10/8, 2012 at 2:33

@Vasily: The project looks cool, but it appears to be a fairly complicated install just to use the docs for reference. Do you know if there are any plans for a read-only version of the HTML files, without needing the whole wiki backend? – Whereat 16/12, 2012 at 3:58

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).

Compensation answered 28/8, 2013 at 14:13 Comment(3)

It's worth noting that this tarball represents a copy of the entire MDN wiki source, including all locales, all user pages, all talk pages, everything. It decompresses on my machine to a gargantuan folder about 5 gigabytes in size. Not a huge deal, but it was way bigger than I expected. – Zebec 18/4, 2014 at 14:19

just use wget --limit-rate=200k --continue https://developer.mozilla.org/media/developer.mozilla.org.tar.gz — which will also let you resume the download. and the file is 7G before decompression now. – Muldoon 26/8, 2015 at 0:37

I download it , but the resources also refer to lots of CDN reosurces. So it still can't work offline. – Convolution 28/12, 2018 at 6:8

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.

Weekend answered 19/12, 2013 at 8:35 Comment(1)

How did I not know about this? This should definitely be marked as the right answer. Offline storage using IndexedDB?!? It's so meta I'm crying. Thanks for building such an amazing tool! – Kristeenkristel 14/10, 2016 at 4:49

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.

Anastasiaanastasie answered 4/5, 2012 at 10:35 Comment(2)

Zeal is a Linux and Windows alternative to Dash. There are even IDE plugins available – Merete 9/8, 2015 at 5:49

Unfortunately currently this Javascript doc only contains the api documentations! – Maihem 1/9, 2017 at 13:57

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.

Whereat answered 16/12, 2012 at 22:44 Comment(3)

This was perfect for me - all the references I need for web development while offline... – Dissimilate 23/3, 2013 at 22:1

This project seems dead – Jacobite 2/10, 2013 at 10:7

Agreed. There're are several open bugs on the project page which seem to say that the screen scrapers don't work anymore. But, I think the accepted answer is better anyway, I don't think that the tarball existed when I posted this answer ten months ago. – Whereat 14/10, 2013 at 18:53

DevDocs gives you 519 different documentations all from MDN and developed using Ruby scraper and JavaScript application. This should help anyone who comes across this question. Its also Open Source on GitHub

Martyr answered 4/10, 2021 at 0:55 Comment(0)

download wget and use it to mirror the doc :

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

Jordon answered 29/2, 2012 at 16:4 Comment(3)

See, this is the kind of server strain that MDN gets just because they don't make it clear how to browse offline. – Radiometeorograph 5/9, 2013 at 20:40

It sends infinite requests. Can this grab all the contents? – Fad 18/6, 2016 at 11:13

The page is not found (404). – Dirigible 12/2, 2021 at 16:7

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