Today the german hosting company "domainFactory" (dF) announced that they will stop supporting the old PHP Versions 4 and 5. dF is one of the last providers to do so.

So this comes as no surprise and I've been waiting for this moment for quite a while now: We have a couple of $clients that are running an old Version of the CMS "TYPO3" on hosting packages at domainFactory, and who won't update to a newer version, no matter how often we advised them. We have discussed, we pleaded, we stated more than once how important it is to have the CMS updated - to no avail.

As I wrote in "SMEgnorance", for some $clients the effort and investment needed to keep a "TYPO3" install up-to-date over a LTS-jump is too high in relation to what they think is the "worth" of their website, so they do nothing, because, well, never touch a running system, right?
- Well, unless your hosting environment gets updated to a point where your CMS system is too old to work with the current PHP-version, which is exactly what's now happening to those $clients.

And since even under the threat of a broken website those $clients still aren't willing to invest in a TYPO3 update, and haven't even updated any content in the recent years, I decided to offer them a STATIC (gasp) version of their website as an alternative emergency-plan. No more hassles regarding security and PHP versions, no more worries about CMS-updates. Sounds good?

The command-line, uhm, command, of choice here is "wget".

With this neat spell:

wget -P ./path/to/dir/ -mpck --user-agent="" -e robots=off --wait 1 -E http://www.name.tld/

you'll get a nicely working local static copy of the website that is responding at "www.name.tld" in the local directory at "./path/to/dir". It even takes care about the relative links and file extensions (here is a nice that explains what all the parameters are doing).

This works, but be careful if you have forms that need some server-side foo -- of course they will be broken. And I don't know what happens to client-side logic and/or generated content, or a SPA.

But for good ol' boring click-to-navigate sites this works like a charm.

HT to this 5 year old article where I found the wget-spell.