Archiving a password-protected site with wget

2012 July 23 (Monday), 11:49PM

The combination of <a href="http://man.cx/wget%22 title="wget's man page">wget</a> and the Export Cookies add-on for Firefox is useful for creating offline, complete, static archives of websites that are only accessible with a password:

1. First log in to the site and export cookies.txt,
2. Then run

   wget \
   --recursive \
   --no-clobber \
   --page-requisites \
   --html-extension \
   --convert-links \
   --restrict-file-names=windows \
   --domains example.com \
   --no-parent \
   --load-cookies cookies.txt \
   --reject logout,admin* \
   example.com/sub/dir
   

The rejection of logout URLs is especially useful, because otherwise one will probably be logged out by wget accessing the logout link.