This project has been abandoned: It was forked from SafariBooks-Downloader, also abandoned, and I made some updates here to test some ideas, but I’m not going to maintain it. You can fork it and continue the work if you want.

safari-hunter

A SafariBooksOnline downloader that generates .epub books for reading offline.

This project was forked from the original SafariBooks-Downloader, created by Nico Haenggi, currently not maintained.

Obviously you need to have a paid membership to be able to read and access the books, this is not a tool to get free books. It’s just to give you the option to read the books you already has access to, but in an offline way.

Use Guide

How To Install

Install Node.js. For more information about how to install it on your environment, see Installing Node.js via package manager. To verify your installation, run:

node -v

If a version is returned, you did successfully install Node.js.

Important: This project has been updated to use ES6 standard modules, instead of traditional CommonJS Modules used in node. To be able to use that feature, you need to execute node using the flag --experimental-modules (already specified in the index.js main file). Double check your node version is at least v12. It’s recommended to use the Node version manager (nvm) to manage different node installations.

Next up, make sure npm is properly installed. To verify, run:

npm -v

If the command returns a version number, you’re all set. Next, we’ll clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/neverbot/safari-hunter.git
cd safari-hunter

Install all the dependencies with npm.

npm install

Congratulations! You’ve successfully installed safari-hunter.
If you desire to do so, you can install the tool globally on your machine. To do so, run:

npm install -g

To verify the installation, please run:

safari-hunter --version

If the command returns a version number, you have successfully installed the tool globally.

How To Update

1. Stop the downloader if it’s running. (use control + c to stop it)
2. Run git pull
   This will update the generator to the latest master branch
3. Reinstall dependencies with npm install or npm install -g
   using npm install -g will install the generator globally
4. Run safari-hunter --version
   After you are done following it this will print out the current version of the generator.

How To Run

The tool provides the following six options. The options —bookid, —username, —password and —output are required. However, if the username and password options are provided once, they will be cached and are no longer required to run the CLI.

Options

• -h, —help
  • displays usage information
• -v, —version
  • displays version number
• -b, —bookid
  • the book id of the SafariBooksOnline ePub to be generated
    you can find the book id by having a look at the URL while reading the book
    e.g. https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/clean-code/9780136083238/ whereas the id will be 9780136083238
• -l, —link
  • the link to the SafariBooksOnline ePub to be generated,
    you can find the link by having a look at the URL while reading the book
• -u, —username
  • username of the SafariBooksOnline user - must have a paid/trial membership, otherwise will not be able to access the books
• -p, —password
  • password of the SafariBooksOnline user
• -o, —output
  • output path the epub file should be saved to. On some systems, the path may require to contains no whitespaces.
• -d, —debug
  • enable debug mode for request package.

Example

An example showing how a SafariBooksOnline with id 9780136083238 is downloaded and converted into a ePub file testbook.epub.

safari-hunter -b 9780136083238 -u yourUser -p yourPassword -o /Users/yourUser/Desktop/testbook.epub

An example showing how a SafariBooksOnline with id 9780136083238 is downloaded and converted into a ePub file testdebugbook.epub.

safari-hunter -d -b 9780136083238 -u yourUser -p yourPassword -o /Users/yourUser/Desktop/testbook.epub

Tip: If your password contains a hyphen (-), a whitespace or some other character that does not allow you to use the command, your can use single quotes: -p 'yourPassword'.

Features

• generating ePub with cover image, authors and publisher
• custom stylesheets will be imported (only one currently)
• support for several different stylesheets in one book
• directly generating .mobi files

Support

If you discover a bug in the generator, please search the issue tracker first. If it hasn’t been reported, please create a new issue.

Feature Requests

If you have a great idea to improve the generator, please search the feature tracker first to ensure someone else hasn’t already come up with the same great idea. If it hasn’t been requested, please create a new request. While you’re there vote on other feature requests to let the me know what is most important to you.

Pull Requests

If you’d like to make your own changes ensure your Pull Request is made against the develop branch.

Credits

• Nico Haenggi: conception & development
• cyrilis: a big thanks to cyrillis for his epub-gen package which I relied upon heavily while integrating my own epub generator
• [new additions] neverbot: project updated after fork.
• [new additions] trobol: --link command line option.

Copyright

• Copyright (c) 2017 Nico Haenggi
• Copyright (c) 2019 neverbot, for the new additions (if such thing is applicable)

License

Released under the MIT License