is there a way to view neocities offline?

[dietcokeorchoke]

i'm not sure exactly how to word my question, so to elaborate- is there a software or program that i could have on a computer or external hard drive, put my neocities website on it, and then allow someone to view it by connecting the hard drive to their computer? no internet required?


i'm thinking about doing an irl project among my friends where i just give them a copy of a "website" that they can access plugging in, it'd just have pixel graphics and inside jokes and stuff. any ideas on how to do something like that? im worried posting this that i'm asking for something dumb and impossible, or otherwise obvious and easy!

[Slix]

I'm not super familiar with what the limitations of Neocities is, but if your website is just html/css files, and no database stuff or anything like that, you can do exactly what you're describing - put the entire folder on an external drive or email it, and share it with your friends! You can try this on your own by downloading the folder that contains all of your files and opening the index.html page in your web browser. It should just open and show you everything you're expecting to see. Note that the URL it will have will be the file location, and not a website URL address. :)

[sen.fish]

What you need is a local web server. I haven't used it before, but this program that came up in a Google search looks simple and seems to match your needs. Just download/extract your Neocities zip file and configure the server path. Alternatively, editors like VSCode will have extensions that will allow you to set up a local web server, but that's probably unnecessary for what you're describing.

If your site is just html/css you could even run it in your browser (granted, you would need to update each file and set the root with the <base> tag), but any modern browser won't let you run scripts from other files for security reasons so this is only viable if you don't link to any js files.

And just to state the obvious, I'm not quite sure if you just mean an offline copy or a file that's accessible without the internet, but for the latter, you would also ofc have to remove and replace any outgoing links to fonts/scripts/images/audio/etc.

[Melooon]

If your site is mostly just HTML, CSS and images then you can just open the .html files in any browser and they should just load like a normal webapge.

The important thing is that you make sure all your file paths are relative!

For example

Code

<img src="http://mysite.example/images/horse.png" />
# This is an absolute URL and will not work offline

<img src="/images/horse.png" />
# This is an absolute path and will only work with a web server

<img src="images/horse.png" />
# This is a relative path and will work anywhere!

The issue is that if you open "~/Desktop/MySite/index.html" and it has horse.png linked, it needs to know where to look for horse.png. If you say horse.png is at "/images/horse.png" then it will look at the root of your harddrive for the images folder, "/" meaning root on unix systems (if you're in a web server it will look at the root of the web server, hence why it works online). Whereas if you just say "images/horse.png" it will look in the same folder as your index.html file, and assuming it's there, it can open it.

Generally you should always code your site with relative file paths for this reason; it's much less lightly to break if you move things around or need to run it locally!

So the steps would be:

• Ensure your site uses relative paths (or possibly try @sen.fish's <base> tag, Iv never used that one!)
• Download your site and put it on a USB
• Open the index.html file using Chrome/Firefox and it should just work like normal!

However, If you need to run a local webserver, an easy way to do it is to install Python then run the command "python3 -m http.server 8000" from the folder your want to turn into a website; that will start a webserver at http://localhost:8000

[dietcokeorchoke]

thank you all very much!!  this was all very helpful, i'm hoping to have it work offline so i'll make sure to keep any resources on the hard drive itself. i'm not 100% on how everything works, i'm new at html and only really used it during the og myspace days lol