Archiving a (WordPress) website with wget
I used wget, which is available on any linux-ish system (I ran it on the same Ubuntu server that hosts the sites).
wget –mirror -p –html-extension –convert-links -e robots=off -P . http://url-to-site
That command doesn’t throttle the requests, so it could cause problems if the server has high load. Here’s what that line does:
–mirror: turns on recursion etc… rather than just downloading the single file at the root of the URL, it’ll now suck down the entire site.
-p: download all prerequisites (supporting media etc…) rather than just the html
–html-extension: this adds .html after the downloaded filename, to make sure it plays nicely on whatever system you’re going to view the archive on
–convert-links: rewrite the URLs in the downloaded html files, to point to the downloaded files rather than to the live site. this makes it nice and portable, with everything living in a self-contained directory.
-e robots=off: executes the «robots off» command, telling wget to ignore any directive to ignore the site in question. This is strictly Not a Good Thing To Do, but if you own the site, this is OK. If you don’t own the site being archived, you should obey all robots.txt files or you’ll be a Very Bad Person.
-P .: set the download directory to something. I left it at the default «.» (which means «here») but this is where you could pass in a directory path to tell wget to save the archived site. Handy, if you’re doing this on a regular basis (say, as a cron job or something…)
http://url-to-site: this is the full URL of the site to download. You’ll likely want to change this.