recently a friends company website that is using Joomla was hacked. Since keeping the website always up to date is not of any priority, it ran an outdated version and I'd assume it could happen again in the future.

To make it less vulnerable I wondered if there is a way to generate static HTML out of a local Joomla installation? Reasoning behind it is, that the page is static anyway and the only reason for having a CMS seems to be to be able to change the content more easily.

Would this possible at all? Or would it be better to look at static html generators?


The "Static Content" project at: https://github.com/juliopontes/staticcontent does exactly what you are after although it looks like it may need to be updated for Joomla 3.5.

Alternatively, you could use Wget or HTTrack or similar to convert your Joomla website to HTML. Linux, Windows and OSX versions are available for both Wget and HTTrack. See the answers to https://serverfault.com/q/441584/270745 for more detailed instructions.

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  • 1
    The 'static content' GitHub project has been 'In development' without a release for 5 years. – Robs Mar 30 '18 at 8:45
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    Look at older commits. You'll see usable code there. – Mike Apr 30 '18 at 18:50

Following on from Neil's response I thought it might be worth including an example of using wget which has worked for me. Link to the approach documented here

wget \
 --recursive \
 --page-requisites \
 --html-extension \
 --convert-links \
 --restrict-file-names=windows \
 --domains your-domain.com \
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    Welcome to JSE and thank you for contributing. Having advice demonstrated/hardcoded into answers is valuable to researchers because it is not vulnerable to hyperlink-breakage and researchers don't have to leave this site to glean the information. Good on ya. Please take our tour and consider telling us about you and your Joomla journey in your Profile. – mickmackusa Jun 17 at 22:40

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