If you're a website developer, a business organisation owner, or a student in the field of IT, you lot've probably come up across an instance where y'all needed to quickly clone a website. Say, for instance, you accept a site you administer that is having bug; you might desire to clone that site and and then showtime debugging the clone. Working with the clone certainly beats the possibility of further breaking your original site.

In that location are plenty of ways to clone a site. 1 solution I take used offers both control line and GUI options, and is chosen httrack. The awarding can be used on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android, and does a full copy of a website for local browsing. The command line tool is, equally you lot expect, called httrack. In that location is also a GUI version for Linux called webhttrack. I'm going to demonstrate how to utilise both the control line and GUI tools, so you can make quick clones of your websites. I'll be demonstrating both versions from Ubuntu Linux.

Installation

Both control line and GUI tools tin can be establish in the standard repositories. To install them, open up a terminal window and issue the control:

sudo apt install httrack webhttrack

When prompted, type your sudo password, take the installation, and allow it to complete. That'due south all in that location is to installing the tools.

Command line usage

First we'll be copying a site using the control line tool. This can take some time, depending on how large your site is. The command for making the re-create is:

httrack http://SITE_URL -O LOCALDIRECTORY

Where SITE_URL is the bodily URL of the site you want to re-create and LOCALDIRECTORY is the directory on your local drive to store the re-create. One time the command completes, you'll see the newly created clone in LOCALDIRECTORY. You can and then commencement working with that clone without affecting your product site.

The biggest caveat to using this tool is that, depending on how the site was written and how it is housed, your results may vary. If you detect httrack downloads picayune more than an index file, chances are, it won't work on your site. I take found, so far, that WordPress sites, particularly those housed on 3rd-party hosts, are adjacent to incommunicable to clone using this tool.

GUI usage

The GUI tool gives you a bit more than user-friendly power. To start the GUI, open up up a last window and issue the control webhttrack. This will open up a browser window with the GUI at the gear up. In the first screen, select your language, and click Next >>. In the next window (Figure A), enter a new project name, and select one of the pre-defined categories. Type in a base path to house the downloaded files, and click Next >>.

Effigy A

In the adjacent window (Figure B), select the action to be used (since this is a first download, the default will be fine) and type the URL for the target site in the address box.

Figure B

Click on the Set Options button and you lot can configure options like browser ID, scan rules, robot rules, number of connections, proxy, limits, and more (Figure C).

Figure C

If y'all run a clone, and find information technology fails, chances are you'll demand to revisit the Options section and make adjustments. This, of course, volition depend upon the blazon of site yous're attempting to clone. Once you've fix the options exactly how you demand them, click OK then click Next >> then click the Start>> push button. At this signal (Figure D), the site will first cloning (saving it in the configured local directory).

Figure D

When the download completes, you tin can begin working with your clone.

Not perfect, but helpful

So long as you're not trying to download a WordPress site, either httrack or webhttrack volition do a bang-up job of downloading a clone of your site, so you can debug, backup, or whatever your needs may be. As I said, depending upon the type of site y'all're looking to work with, y'all'll have to toy around with the settings to get this to piece of work. Give this handy tool a try and encounter if information technology doesn't wind upwardly as your go-to site clone tool.