Installing the Lores-Kiwix App

Kiwix is available standalone on Co-op Cloud, and is you just install the regular Kiwix recipe, that will display your archives as expected. However, for LoRes Mesh we have provided a special LoRes Kiwix recipe which shares information about which “books” (website archives) it has installed with other nodes in the region.

It looks a lot like installing any app with abra, so let’s go through steps very similar to other Co-op Cloud apps:

Creating the app

Let’s add the new app using the command below. Remember to replace YOUR_HOSTNAME with the actual hostname of your Pi (eg lores).

abra app new lores-kiwix --server YOUR_HOSTNAME.local --domain kiwix-YOUR_HOSTNAME.local

Also note that although the recipe is called lores-kiwix we recommend just using kiwix in the --domain as above.

Configuring the app

We do have something to configure here, so let’s run:

abra app config kiwix-YOUR_HOSTNAME.local

There’s a line in the config that starts with: ZIM_FILES_PATH=. We need to change that to the path to the flash drive we set in the last section:

ZIM_FILES_PATH=/mnt/zims

And another line that starts with: PANDA_GRPC_ADDR=. We need to change this to:

PANDA_GRPC_ADDR=http://YOUR_HOSTNAME_local_app:50051

Deploying the app

Deploy this change to your Raspberry Pi by running:

abra app deploy kiwix-YOUR_HOSTNAME.local

Then you can check that it has worked by directing a web browser at https://kiwix-YOUR_HOSTNAME.local (eg, kiwix-lores.local)

Enjoying local Wikipedia

Now, you should have a local copy of Kiwix serving up the websites that you put on the flash drive.

You now how a local resource library in your building. If you’re the only LoRes Node you know, you can stop here, but if you are connected to any others, in the next step we’ll cover sharing your Kiwix “books” with the rest of your Region.

Checklist

You should have completed:

• Kiwix is running on you Pi, accessible on the local network
• Kiwix is displaying the zims from your flash drive