Website copiers

All in all, I find wget better (more intuitive), even if it seems less configurable.

wget

• wget can act has a powerful mirroring tool. Use it like this:

wget -p -k -H -nH -nd -E www.apple.com

• The -p option will download dependent files like images or CSS, the -k activate link rewriting, -E activates file renaming (like moving a .php file to an .html), and -H means you can download from other hosts than the original one.
• -nH and -nd are minor options affecting how directories are created.
• You can specify a link depth level (compared to HTTrack, it is one less, eg a link level of 1 will already fetch the linked URLs, which is much more logical).
• If you need to disable robot exclusion (robots.txt and others), use the -e robots=off command line option.
• The -q option makes wget silent. -T specifies a timeout and -t the number of retries (default is 20).

Warnings

• Be careful that wget outputs to the stderr, not stdout.

Limitations

• You cannot rewrite URLs to an hardcoded location.
• You cannot rename the main page downloaded to another name.
• You cannot change the encoding of downloaded files.

HTTrack

• This software seems useful but is quite complex and not very intuitive. Some important optios:
  • -n: this will activate fetches for related elements like CSS files and images (same as -p on wget). However it won't activate rewriting on those elements unless you have a higher link depth level, which make it less poerful than wget.
  • -e: similar to -H on wget.
  • -r10: this specifies the link depth level (10 in this example). Note that it starts at 2 and not one.

• You can change the original directory hierarchy structure with some options.