Phetscraper NPM

PhET Simulations scraper

This scraper creates offline versions in ZIM format of PhET science simulations for Science and Math.

Requirements

It requires Node.js version 16 or higher.

Quick Start

npm i && npm start

The above will eventually output a ZIM file to dist/

Command line arguments

--withoutLanguageVariants uses to exclude languages with Country variant. For example en_CA will not be present in zim with this argument.

Available only on GET step:

--withoutLanguageVariants ...

Available on GET and EXPORT steps only:

--includeLanguages lang_1 [lang_2] [lang_3] ...
--excludeLanguages lang_1 [lang_2] [lang_3] ...

Available on EXPORT step only:

# Skip ZIM files for individual languages
--mulOnly

Example:

npm run get -- --includeLanguages en ru fr

Config

Another way to configure behaviour is through environment variables. Sample .env file (with default values):

# request per second, affects GET step only
PHET_RPS=8
# async workers on TRANSFORM step (keep it equal to number of CPU cores)
PHET_WORKERS=10
# number of retries on GET step (delay grow with exponential backoff)
PHET_RETRIES=5
# display verbose errors
PHET_VERBOSE_ERRORS=false

About

This project achieves multiple things:

Download PhET content
Generate an Index for said content
Generate ZIM file(s) containing content and index

Things this project does not yet do, but should:

Generate Android APK

Usage

The functionality is split into 5 npm scripts:

npm run setup - deletes state from previous runs
npm run get - downloads PhET simulations in specified languages
npm run transform - prepare the content and media files
npm run export - generates ZIM file(s)
npm start - runs all of the above in sequence

The steps get, transform and export have their own output directories:

get outputs HTML and PNG files to state/get
transform outputs intermediate files to state/transform
export outputs HTML and PNG files to state/export AND a ZIM file(s) to dist/

License

Apache or later, see LICENSE for more details.