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Articles & Guides / General / Archive Mirroring Guide

Kenneth "Shrimp" Watson
2018-11-16
2018-11-20
Guide to creating local mirrors of the archive content, and the website.

Archive Mirroring Guide

To ensure the longevity of the archive, you're encouraged to create your own local (or hosted, if needed) mirrors of both the archive content, and the website itself.

Both are supported by the unreal-archive tool.

Note: As of this writing, the unreal-archive tool has only been tested on Linux environments. Please refer to the project's README document for information on running it on other platforms.

Content Mirror

Before you begin, you will need the following:

  1. Java 8 JRE
  2. Download the unreal-archive tool
  3. Download or clone the unreal-archive-data git repository
  4. Several hundred GB free disk space

To create a local mirror of all content (maps, skins, mods, etc) within the archive, run the unreal-archive tool with the following parameters:

$ ./unreal-archive mirror /local/mirror/output --content-path=/path/to/unreal-archive-data --concurrency=5

This will load all the content defined within the unreal-archive-data repository, and then begin downloading all the actual files to the specified /local/mirror/output directory.

If you want to attempt tuning the concurrency, adjust the --concurrency option's value. The default is 3.

The entire process will take a while, depending on the size of the content repository, available bandwidth, etc., but once completed, you'll have a complete local copy of everything the archive contains.

Website Mirror

The option exists to create a complete mirror of the archive website, with the intention that this can be easily re-generated and re-hosted at any point, should the original website go down, or if you simply want to create an offline copy of the website for your own use.

Before you begin, you will need the following:

  1. Download the unreal-archive tool
  2. Download or clone the unreal-archive-data git repository
  3. Several GB free disk space

To create a local mirror of the website, run the unreal-archive tool with the following parameters:

$ ./unreal-archive www /local/website/path --local-images=true --content-path=/path/to/unreal-archive-data

This will generate a copy of the website, within the directory specified by /local/website/path. The option --local-images=true will also download all images needed by the website, to the output directory, rather than linking to them remotely.

You may then open the index.html file within the output directory to begin browsing the site.