# Archiving Discourse into a Website

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-discourse-into-a-website/396731
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Created:** [February 22, 2026, 4:01pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-discourse-into-a-website/396731 "2026-02-22T16:01:42Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Ricardo\_Viteri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/ricardo_viteri/32/65442_2.png) [@Ricardo\_Viteri](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Ricardo_Viteri)
#### Post date: [February 22, 2026, 4:01pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-discourse-into-a-website/396731/1 "2026-02-22T16:01:42Z")

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Hi all!

I’ve had a forum running for over a decade and over time it has lost relevance. The topic around what the forum was built served its purpose.

I’ve financially sponsored hosting over the years but I wonder what is a good way to convert the forum to more of a regular site. I’d love to change the forum to read only but there are some hosting costs that I need to cover associated to hosting discourse on a third party service. It doesn’t make much sense to keep the full forum going.

Wondering if there is a way I can download the DB and create a static site out of it.

Thanks for the suggestions!

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### Author: ![Canapin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/canapin/32/119591_2.png) [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [February 22, 2026, 6:05pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-discourse-into-a-website/396731/2 "2026-02-22T18:05:20Z")

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There are several discussions about this. Most of them redirect to [A basic Discourse archival tool](https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-basic-discourse-archival-tool/62614)

There’s also [Any updates on the best way to create a HTML archive of a static site?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/any-updates-on-the-best-way-to-create-a-html-archive-of-a-static-site/373808)

I don’t know if the tools provided in those still work.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [February 22, 2026, 11:28pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archiving-discourse-into-a-website/396731/4 "2026-02-22T23:28:30Z")

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Here’s how I’ve done it before.

If you want to keep PMs too (probably a bad idea if you’re making this public!)

Consider moving PMs to a category like:

```plaintext
c=Category.create(title: pms) # TODO: and stuff to make it private
pms=Topic.where(archetype: "private_message", subtype: "user_to_user")
pms.update_all(category_id: c.id, archetype: "regular")

```

Paste this to assign the cookie to `COOKIE` and then paste the cookies copied to clipboard by the Cooke Chrome extension.

```plaintext
COOKIE=$(cat |jq -r '.[]|select(.name == "_t")|.value')

```

enter the URL here:

then paste:

```plaintext
wget --mirror --page-requisites --convert-links --adjust-extension --compression=auto --reject-regex "/search" --no-if-modified-since --no-check-certificate --execute robots=off --random-wait --wait=1 --user-agent="Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)" --no-cookies --header "Cookie: _t=$COOKIE" =FORUMURL=

```

If you’ve got a budget and need more help, my contact info is in my profile.