Download a Website Using wget

Recently, I needed to clone a website and make a few minor changes to it. I wanted to publish a slightly modified copy of the website. Luckily, it’s easy to do that using wget. Here’s how I did it.

1. Install wget

I’m on Mac, so I installed wget using Homebrew using the command 

brew install wget

2. Download site

I wanted to download this small website. I used this command:

wget -p -r https://events.govexec.com/qualys-cyber-risk-conference/
  • The -p flag means download all page requisites, such as images, stylesheets, etc.
  • The -r flag means recursive.

Learn more

3. Search and replace

Since I downloaded a bunch of HTML files, if I wanted to replace a common element on multiple pages, the easiest way was to do a search and replace. Using VisualStudio Code, you can easily find all HTML blocks within a particular tag using a multi-line regex. Here are some example regexes:

<footer(.|\n)*?</footer>
<script(.|\n)*?</script>
<a class="popup(.|\n)*?</a>

Note: these regexes only work if the tags don’t have any nested tags with the same name.

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