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I am trying to make MDN's Javascript Reference available for offline browsing (personal use). To spare me from running some sort of web crawler program or saving individual pages to create a local copy, does Mozilla make an offline version of their documentation available for download? If so, where can I download it?

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  • There is currently no offline version of the MDN docs and you can stop crawling the FTP server - you won't find it there. Exporting the docs for offline use is planned for the next MDN version but I'm not sure how far along that one is. Commented Mar 1, 2012 at 5:45
  • As @WladimirPalant mentioned, this is planned. See also: original suggestion and the associated bug. Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 13:38
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    MDN offline copy. github.com/mozilla/kuma Commented Aug 10, 2012 at 2:33
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    @Vasily: The project looks cool, but it appears to be a fairly complicated install just to use the docs for reference. Do you know if there are any plans for a read-only version of the HTML files, without needing the whole wiki backend? Commented Dec 16, 2012 at 3:58

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Download it at https://mdn-downloads.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/developer.mozilla.org.tar.gz

The "Downloading content" section of About MDN provides the above link (for a tarball download) along with guidance on other ways to access the MDN content, both as single pages and via third-party tools.

And others : don't mirror with wget & co, this is putting un-needed pressure on the website and hinders other users. At least make sure https://developer.mozilla.org/robots.txt (which asks for gentle throttling) is properly handled. Wget does not handle this for instance (http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?30999).

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It's worth noting that this tarball represents a copy of the entire MDN wiki source, including all locales, all user pages, all talk pages, everything. It decompresses on my machine to a gargantuan folder about 5 gigabytes in size. Not a huge deal, but it was way bigger than I expected.
just use wget --limit-rate=200k --continue https://developer.mozilla.org/media/developer.mozilla.org.tar.gz — which will also let you resume the download. and the file is 7G before decompression now.
I download it , but the resources also refer to lots of CDN reosurces. So it still can't work offline.
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The JavaScript docs along with most of MDN's web reference pages are available on DevDocs.

The app is open source and can be run offline: https://github.com/Thibaut/devdocs

It's easy to set up and doesn't require scraping MDN.

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How did I not know about this? This should definitely be marked as the right answer. Offline storage using IndexedDB?!? It's so meta I'm crying. Thanks for building such an amazing tool!
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If you have a Mac, Dash (http://kapeli.com/dash) has docsets generated from the Mozilla Developer Network, including JavaScript. You can also avoid using Dash by downloading the docset directly from http://kapeli.com/feeds/JavaScript.tgz.

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Zeal is a Linux and Windows alternative to Dash. There are even IDE plugins available
Unfortunately currently this Javascript doc only contains the api documentations!
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This looks fairly promising: https://github.com/rgarcia/dochub

It's an all-in-one documentation site which can be installed on your own computer (requires node), containing data from a number of standard web references including MDN. It contains a screen scraper component that extracts the info from MDN, and updates it fairly quickly (at least a lot faster than the wget mirror command mentioned above). I haven't confirmed how complete the docs are as scraped, but at first glance they look pretty good.

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This was perfect for me - all the references I need for web development while offline...
This project seems dead
Agreed. There're are several open bugs on the project page which seem to say that the screen scrapers don't work anymore. But, I think the accepted answer is better anyway, I don't think that the tarball existed when I posted this answer ten months ago.
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DevDocs gives you 519 different documentations all from MDN and developed using Ruby scraper and JavaScript application. This should help anyone who comes across this question. Its also Open Source on GitHub

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This was posted 8 years before you did, by Thibaut, it's maintainer. Next time, check the existing answers.
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download wget and use it to mirror the doc :

wget -m -p https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference

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See, this is the kind of server strain that MDN gets just because they don't make it clear how to browse offline.
It sends infinite requests. Can this grab all the contents?
The page is not found (404).

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