How in the Tech

Downloading an Entire Web Site with wget

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 25, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Command Line, Linux

GNU wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web, generally available on most Linux installs.  It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies. Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the user is not logged on.  This allows you to start a retrieval and disconnect from the system, letting wget finish the work.  By contrast, most of the Web browsers require constant user’s presence, which can be a great hindrance when transferring a lot of data.

One of the powerful features of wget is its ability to retreive a complete mirror of a website, locally, on your hard drive. It is also intelligent enough to only download links or files associated with the website, without traversing external links. Though it would be a generous public service, you probably wouldn’t want to mirror the entire Internet!

Here’s how you do it.

From a Linux shell:

$ wget -mk -w 10 http://www.google.com/

• -m instructs wget to enter mirroring mode
• -k instructs wget to convert links in the webpages downloaded to local links
• -w 10 instructs wget to delay 10 seconds between requests. This is really just to maintain proper net etiquette; it’s not required

Not running Linux or otherwise have no access to wget? Don’t fret, wget has been ported to Windows. Wget is a powerful utility that I’ve barely scratched the surface here. Find out more on wget by reading the associated manpages.