OfflineShelf — Wikipedia Reading Lists for Offline Use

2026 · Full-stack · Flask + React · Open source

Millions of articles. Choose the ones that matter.

OfflineShelf helps a school, library or clinic without reliable internet decide which Wikipedia articles to carry offline, and keeps that decision repeatable. A list can come from a Wikipedia category, a Wikidata query, a pasted reading list or the most-read articles of a month, and lists can be combined: "Vaccines minus Companies". Each list can rebuild every month, keeps a history of what was added and removed, and exports as a spreadsheet file, a folder of web pages that opens from a USB stick, or a ZIM file for the free Kiwix reader apps.

Source Case study

Home — millions of articles, choose the ones that matter

4
list builders: 3
export formats: 235
automated tests: 100%
core branch coverage

Role: Solo build — product, API design, list logic, Wikimedia integration, background jobs, exports, web app, SEO, security, tests and docs
Stack: Python 3.12FlaskPydantic 2SQLAlchemy 2AlembicRQMariaDB 11.4RedislibzimReact 19TypeScriptViteTailwind CSS 4Three.jsDocker
Proof trail: Skills on show 10
Backed by 04
Security baseline: Wikimedia-only host allow listArgon2id passwordsCSRF tokensPer-IP and per-account rate limitsStrict CSP with noncesOwner check on every listNon-root, read-only containersCodeQL and SonarQube on every PR
Read & verify: Source on GitHub Case study · Building OfflineShelf Article · A library that fits on a USB stick

Built at the end of October 2026 across 26 pull requests: a Flask API with Pydantic validation, MariaDB and Redis, background workers on RQ, and a plain-Python list layer with 100% branch coverage. It works in any language edition of eight Wikimedia projects and talks to Wikimedia the way its API rules ask: an identified client that backs off when the servers are busy. It stores only titles and IDs, never article text, and every export carries the CC BY-SA attribution the content needs. Every feature works end to end in Docker; the public launch at offlineshelf.ahmershah.dev is planned for February 2027, after end-to-end and load testing.

01
Four ways to ask for a list: a category walked to a chosen depth without looping, a Wikidata query mapped to articles, a pasted reading list with redirects followed and gaps reported, or the top articles by pageviews for a month.
02
Lists combine: union, intersection and difference of up to ten lists, and a combination rebuilds by itself when one of its sources gets a new version.
03
A failed rebuild never replaces the last good list: every build is a separate version with a report, and the owner sees exactly which articles came and went since the previous one.
04
Three exports for three kinds of places: a TSV for spreadsheets and scripts, an HTML bundle that opens from a USB stick with no server, and a searchable ZIM file for the Kiwix apps.

Screens · OfflineShelf