wikiget

Something like wget for downloading a file from MediaWiki sites (like Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons) using only the file name or the URL of its description page.

Installation

Requires Python 3.7+ and pip. Install the latest version with:

pip install wikiget

For the latest features, at the risk of bugs and undocumented behavior, you can install the development version directly from GitHub:

pip install https://github.com/clpo13/wikiget/archive/refs/heads/master.zip

Usage

wikiget [-h] [-V] [-q | -v] [-f] [-s SITE] [-P PATH] [-u USERNAME] [-p PASSWORD] [-o OUTPUT | -a] [-l LOGFILE] [-j THREADS] FILE

The only required parameter is FILE, which is the file you want to download. It can either be the name of the file on the wiki, including the namespace prefix, or a link to the file description page. If FILE is in the form File:Example.jpg or Image:Example.jpg, it will be fetched from the default site, which is "commons.wikimedia.org". If it's the fully-qualified URL of a file description page, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Example.jpg, the file is fetched from the site in the URL, in this case "en.wikipedia.org". Note: full URLs may contain characters your shell interprets differently, so you can either escape those characters with a backslash \ or surround the entire URL with single ' or double " quotes. Use of a fully-qualified URL like this may require setting the --path flag (see next paragraph).

The site can also be specified with the --site flag, though this will not have any effect if the full URL is given. Non-Wikimedia sites should work, but you may need to specify the wiki's script path with --path (where index.php and api.php live; on Wikimedia sites it's /w/, but other sites may use / or something else entirely). Private wikis (those requiring login even for read access) are also supported with the use of the --username and --password flags.

More detailed information, such as the site used and full URL of the file, can be displayed with -v or --verbose. Use -vv to display even more detail, mainly debugging information or API messages. -q can be used to silence warnings. A logfile can be specified with -l or --logfile. If this option is present, the logfile will contain the same information as -v along with timestamps. New log entries will be appended to an existing logfile.

By default, the program won't overwrite existing files with the same name as the target, but this can be forced with -f or --force. Additionally, the file can be downloaded to a different name with -o.

Files can be batch downloaded with the -a or --batch flag. In this mode, FILE will be treated as an input file containing multiple files to download, one filename or URL per line. Blank lines and lines starting with "#" are ignored. If an error is encountered, execution stops immediately and the offending filename is printed. For large batches, the process can be sped up by downloading files in parallel. The number of parallel downloads can be set with -j. For instance, with -a -j4, wikiget will download four files at once. Without -j or with -j by itself without a number, wikiget will download the files one at a time.

Example usage

wikiget File:Example.jpg
wikiget --site en.wikipedia.org File:Example.jpg
wikiget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Example.jpg -o test.jpg

Future plans

• optional machine-readable (JSON) log output
• batch download by (Commons) category or user uploads
• maybe: download Wikipedia articles, in plain text, wikitext, or other formats

Contributing

Pull requests, bug reports, or feature requests are more than welcome.

It's recommended that you use a virtual environment manager like venv or virtualenv to create an isolated environment in which to install this package's dependencies as not to clutter your system Python environment:

# if you plan on submitting pull requests, fork the repo on GitHub and clone that instead
git clone https://github.com/clpo13/wikiget
cd wikiget

python3 -m venv venv
# or
virtualenv venv

To activate the virtual environment, use one of the following commands:

# Linux and macOS; activate.csh and activate.fish are also available
source venv/bin/activate

# Windows (Command Prompt or PowerShell)
.\venv\Scripts\activate

Then run pip install -e . to invoke an "editable" install, meaning any changes made to the source will be reflected immediately in the executable script. Unit tests can be run with pytest (make sure to run pip install pytest in the virtual environment first.)

Alternatively, using Hatch, simply clone the repository and run hatch run test to create the environment and run pytest all in one go. Wikiget can also be run directly in the Hatch environment with hatch run wikiget [...].

License

Copyright (C) 2018-2023 Cody Logan and contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.