Wikisophia, entombed

It turns out that creating a static version of a MediaWiki instance is non-trivial; who knew? This is due, in part, to ResourceLoader and other performance-hacks.

There is nothing a little recursive wget can’t fix, of course; but the problem is that naïve wget produces files of the form:

load.php?modules=jquery.client&version=20150104T015506Z&*

which Apache will never match, since they look like a base-file plus query-string.

One clever mechanism for dealing with pseudo-query-string filenames is to rewrite the query-delimiter as %3F:¹

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !=""
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1\%3f%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

Since the underlying files appear to lack extensions, however, Apache will serve them as e.g. text/html;² which browers refuse to interpret as, say, CSS and JavaScript.

We can employ a little rewrite- and mod_header-trickery to serve them with appropriate MIME-types:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} only=styles
RewriteRule ^load.php - [QSA,E=content_type:text/css]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} only=scripts
RewriteRule ^load.php - [QSA,E=content_type:text/javascript]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} modules=jquery
RewriteRule ^load.php - [QSA,E=content_type:text/javascript]

<FilesMatch "load\.php">
        Header set Content-type %{content_type}e
</FilesMatch>

Voilà! A static MediaWiki instance with a little breakage here and there; but, in the main, functional.