How to make website available offline

Question

I want to make my website available offline even if the user clears the cache and cookies. Is is possible? Also I am dealing with database. Is is possible to handle databases offline?

Answer 1

1. A user could store a local copy of a single webpage using Chrome (right click save-as) and it will store all resources (images, css, js) required to fully load the page offline. Other browsers will have similar options.

2. You can use wget to mirror a whole website for offline browsing.

   wget --mirror --convert-links --html-extension -p http://www.example.com/
   

   of course neither of these options will handle database driven elements of your site/page.

3. If you want to mock a database or dynamic elements of a page offline then Google Gears is probably the closest to what you are looking for but I think it was deprecated by Google last year.

Answer 2

If your users have modern browsers, try HTML5 Application Cache.

References:

Overview - http://www.html5rocks.com/en/features/offline

Demo - https://jonathanstark.com/labs/app-cache-7/

Tutorial - https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/

Article - http://grinninggecko.com/developing-cross-platform-html5-offline-app-1/

Answer 3

Summary: Click me, I'm the newish thing that browsers now support!

I clicked some of the links found in other answers, and all tools mentioned are deprecated or will/should be soon.

Later when I wasn't connected to the internet, I opened a site operated by Google (either Google Docs or YouTube, I sadly forgot since then) and went to view the page source, as I was curious to see other answers in action. I found something called ORIGIN-TRIAL in the manifest file. After a quick Google search, I found this, which brought me to this, which somehow brought me to the last link:

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/primers/service-workers

In conclusion, use Service Workers now. If you're curious if it now works with all browsers, don't worry. All popular browsers should support it as seen here.