HTTrack -- Make any Website Offline

HTTrack is a free tool that can clone an entire website. HTTrack allows to download any website in local folder. It comes pre-installed in Kali Linux.

HTTrack copies all the website including HTML pages, images, directories, links, structures from the server to our system's drive. It make a page by page copy of an website. That we can visit the website offline. This helps penetration testers a lot. When we don't have to study a a website's content in short time then we can save it on our local drive for reading in future.

HTTrack has two versions one is command line (CLI) another is graphical based (GUI). In our this detailed post we will talk about these both.

HTTrack

HTTrack comes with Kali Linux full version or we can install it on Kali or other Debian based distro by using following command:

sudo apt-get install httrack -y

After the installation process done we can copy an website to copy a website we use following command:

httrack https://site_ur -O /home/user/directory

The above command will clone the example website on our required directory. Then we can browse it's index page from our local disk.

Otherwise we can just use httrack command to run it on interactive mode:

httrack

Then it will as us the project name as we can see in the following screenshot:

Here we can enter our project name as we wish. Then we press return or enter key and it will ask for path to save the cloned offline website. We can choose any path on our system or simply press Enter key to use default path i.e /home/kali/websites

Here we need to put the URL of websites. We can clone multiple websites by entering their URL's separated by comma or blank space. For an example we are going to clone the blog of re4son and we put the URL as we can see in the following screenshot:

We press return and we get some other options.

1. Mirror Web Site(s)
   
2. Mirror Web Site(s) with Wizard
   
3. Just Get Files Indicated
   
4. Mirror ALL links in URLs (Multiple Mirror)
   
5. Test Links In URLs (Bookmark Test)
   

We can choose any number as per our requirements here for an example we just mirror a website so we choose 1 and press Enter .

Then we need to set a proxy we don't using any proxy here so we simply hit Enter.

Now it will ask for define wildcards we also don't need any special wildcards so we press Enter again for none.

Then we can choose manual options here we can type help for options but we hit Enter again to skip it.

Now we are ready to mirror or clone the website. HTTrack asks that we are ready or not to lunch the mirror process here we press y for yes and hit Enter.

Then our cloning process will started as we can in the following screenshot:

Here it will take some time depending how big website we have chosen and our network speed.

After completing the process we can see offline copy of our website in our local directory /home/kali/websites

Then inside of our project directory (Example was our project name) we got the website's offline copy.

We can open the index.html file on any browser to access the offline website.

In the following screenshot we can see the offline website is opened in chromium web browser and check the URL section to be sure that it is offline.

Now this is not end. HTTrack have a GUI version let's talk about it.

WebHTTrack

WebHTTrack is a web-based Graphical User Interface version of HTTrack. We can install it by using following command:

sudo apt-get install webhttrack -y

Now we can launch it by simply using webhttrack command on our terminal. Also we can start it from application menu.

After launching it we can see that it opens in our browser. As we told it is a web based tool. We can see it is opened in our browser in the following screenshot:

Here default language is English or we can change the language. We are alright with English so we click on "Next" Then we got something like following screenshot:

Here we can fill the projects name, paths etc and click on next.

Here we can fill the inputs like URLs for cloning and other parameters then we click on "Next".

Then we will be on the Start Page. Here we got the "Start" button and we press it.

Then it will start downloading the website on our defined storage location.

From here we can see the mirrored website. This GUI based tool is very easy to use.

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