The Raspberry Pi landscape is filled with ingenious creations, ranging from simple yet effective DIY hacks to downright insane passion projects that are as unique as they are useful. Kiwix falls in the latter category, as this self-hosted solution can help you accommodate most of the open-source information databanks inside your local hardware. The best part? Kiwix is extremely easy to set up, and you can even get it working on your Raspberry Pi!

What you’ll need

Despite the seemingly ridiculous premise of this project, Kiwix consumes fairly low system resources. As such, you can get this neat service running on every SBC in the Raspberry Pi lineup, including the underpowered Zero boards. However, the situation is radically different when it comes to the storage device. Given how the ZIM file for Wikipedia is around 100 GB, you’ll need plenty of storage capacity to fit multiple educational databases on your Raspberry Pi. Considering the exorbitant rates of high-capacity microSD cards, I recommend grabbing an external hard drive if you’re planning to load your Raspberry Pi with huge ZIM files.

This article will also assume you’ve already installed an OS on the Raspberry Pi. We have a guide on setting up the Raspberry Pi OS that you can consult if you’re stuck, but CLI distros such as DietPi are also quite useful on weaker RPi models. Finally, you’ll need the Docker Engine package installed on your preferred distro before attempting this project.

• Raspberry Pi 5

  $75 $80 Save $5

  CPU

  Arm Cortex-A76 (quad-core, 2.4GHz)

  Memory

  Up to 8GB LPDDR4X SDRAM

  Operating System

  Raspberry Pi OS (official)

  Ports

  2× USB 3.0, 2× USB 2.0, Ethernet, 2x micro HDMI, 2× 4-lane MIPI transceivers, PCIe Gen 2.0 interface, USB-C, 40-pin GPIO header

  GPU

  VideoCore VII

  $60 at Adafruit $60 at CanaKit $75 at Amazon (8GB)

• SanDisk 256GB Extreme microSDXC UHS-I Memory Card

  $22 $28 Save $6

  $22 at Amazon

• WD My Book External Hard Drive

  $110 $140 Save $30

  $110 at Amazon

Configuring the Kiwix Server

Once you’ve got everything ready, it’s time to download the ZIM files of your favorite knowledge banks and add them to the Kiwix server.

1. Head to the official Kiwix library.
2. Click on the Download button under your preferred databank and choose Direct inside the menu.
3. Once the ZIM file has finished downloading, use the File Manager to note the path of the folder housing it.
4. Launch the terminal app.
5. Paste the following code to deploy the Kiwix server: sudo docker run -v /path_to_ZIM_file:/data -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/kiwix/kiwix-serve file.zim Be sure to replace the path_to_ZIM_file variable with the path from step 3. Likewise, overwrite file.zim with the name of the database you plan to deploy on your Kiwix server.
6. If you’re planning to host multiple databases on the Raspberry Pi, you can add the other ZIM files at the end of this command.
7. Type localhost followed by a colon (:) and port number 8080 to access the Kiwix server on your Raspberry Pi. Alternatively, you can enter the IP address of your Raspberry Pi instead of localhost to connect to the Kiwix server on another system.

Building a robust knowledge bank with the Raspberry Pi

With that, your Raspberry Pi-flavored education hub is ready for use. If you’re a DIY enthusiast with dedicated server-grade equipment, you can follow this procedure to run the Kiwix server on your home lab. In fact, you can take this project to the next level by deploying additional containers for Calibre Web and Audiobookshelf. This way, you can access everything from Wiki databases and e-books to podcasts and audiobooks with the help of your self-hosting workstation.