Static HTML mirror of Discourse forums

This is a Go program that creates a simple, static HTML mirror of Discourse forum.

Creating a static copy of Discourse forum with web mirroring tools like wget is pretty much impossible (I tried).

This tool uses Discourse's JSON APIs to overcome this.

Example mirror: https://forum.sumatrapdfreader.org/

How to run it

Let's assume your Discourse forum is hosted on https://myforum.mydomain.com

Run:

mirror-discourse https://myforum.mydomain.com

This creates a static HTML mirror in www directory and starts a local server to preview it at http://localhost:8777

You can then deploy such website publicly using e.g. https://render.com or netlify or vercel.

Options

Available cmd-line options:

-dir <directory> : changes the output directory from www. Will also create cache directory as a sibiling directory
-limit <n> : a large forum will take a long time to process. If you're just testing, use -limit 1 to only process first page of results
-banner <banner.html> : you can add a piece of HTML to be shown at the top of generated index.html e.g. a notice that this is read-only forum and maybe a link to new forum. See sumatra_forum_banner.html for example. Alternatively, you can edit tmpl_main.html or edit index.html after it was generated.

If you have Go compiler installed

Option 1

go install https://github.com/kjk/mirror-discourse
mirror-discourse https://myforum.mydomain.com

Option 2

Download the code locally and run:

go run . https://myforum.mydomain.com

If you don't have Go compiler installed

You can open the code in e.g. Gitpod: https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/kjk/mirror-discourse

Then run:

go run . https://myforum.mydomain.com

You can then download meta_discourse directory locally.

Customize the output

You can change:

main.css
tmpl_main.html : template for home page
tmpl_topic.html : template for topic page

In main.go you can also change banner_html to html fragment displayed at the top of every page. Alternatively, change tmpl_main.html and tmpl_topic.html.

I used it to point people to new forum.

Inspiration

This program is a port of https://www.marksmath.org/ArchiveDiscourse/

ArchiveDiscourse is a Jupiter notebook and I just coulddn't figure out how to run it locally.

So I ported it instead.

No support

This code worked for me.

If it doesn't work for you, tough.

I will not help you, so don't ask.

kjk / mirror-discourse