Skip to content

Mirroring

Jump to bottom
rgaudin edited this page Jun 26, 2026 · 2 revisions

If you are considering mirroring ZIM files, please read the Downloads page before.

URL: rsync://master.download.kiwix.org/download.kiwix.org/

Anyone is free to mirror the Kiwix Catalog, be it via BitTorrent, HTTP or Rsync but the Kiwix load-balancer only forwards traffic to identified mirrors.

What we are looking for:

  • Any region in the world but particularly Asia.
  • At least 1Gbps of un-metered bandwidth.
  • HTTPs serving of mirrored files.
  • Read-only rsync access for us to scan your mirror.

Important

We ask for un-metered bandwidth because we cannot predict nor guarantee how much traffic the mirror would get.

We have had mirrors receive expensive invoice because they thought their quota was to high to ever be reached. We do get spikes.

  • You are free to mirror as many files as you'd like. You will be pulling the files via Rsync so you can choose your filters.
  • If you want your mirror to serve only a specific IP prefix or ASN or Region or Country•ies, that's possible.

At the moment (June 26), the complete repository is 8.1TB. It includes 2 copies of each content, so that when a new one arrives, we don't break the ongoing downloads.

# get the size of each main folder
RSYNC_URL=master.download.kiwix.org/download.kiwix.org/zim/
for DIR in `rsync --list-only --exclude "*.*" $RSYNC_URL/* | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f5`; do \
  SIZE=`rsync --stats -h -r "${RSYNC_URL}/$DIR/" | grep "Total file size" | sed 's/.*://'` \
&& echo $DIR:$SIZE; \
done

Ready?

Send us a message at contact+mirror@kiwix.org with:

  • IP(s) your server use to rsync (to add to our whitelist).
  • HTTPs URL of the mirror's base.
  • The contact email of the mirror admin.
  • The name and URL of your org.
  • Country the server is located in.
  • Rsync URL for the read-only rsync access. Please whitelist srv-m.k8s.kiwix.org, srv-s.k8s.kiwix.org, srv-b.k8s.kiwix.org, services.k8s.kiwix.org and hippo.yeleman.com.

Once whitelisted, you'll be able to switch to rsync://master.download.kiwix.org/master.download.kiwix.org/ which will have a slot for your server.

Please note that although the Rsync repository offers releases and nightly for Kiwix and openZIM software, the load-balancer serves only ZIM file (and the zim/ prefix must appear in your mirror URL).

Clone this wiki locally