I was thinking about putting together an offline internet-in-a-box, but nearly all of the tutorials are hosted on a raspberry pi or some other similar, fairly portable low cost device.
I was wondering if anyone has already set up a way to host one of these off a local NAS, with a frontend I could access via browser.
I don’t know for sure, but I think they generally refer to archives of specific websites that would be good to keep in case of an apocalypse. The thing that comes is the Wikipedia archive that is, at minimum, text-only. Not sure which other website archives people like to keep in case the Internet apocalypse.
Each site you want will different. Wikipedia is …a wiki site. But, YouTube is a video site. Reddit is a message board. There are blog type sites. There are download sites, Google docs is highly interactive. All just different, a few may be the same-ish. And then, you can’t really fit the Internet on a box in your house. And the cost to host it elsewhere will be astronomical. Sounds like you have a few in mind? Find out what software they run, run it locally, and then download the site you can ant to mirror. You should be able to locate a crawler that will build the database(a) locally. Definitely legwork for a whole site/set of sites. Much easier if it’s a type of media: books, video, audio, PDFs, a database.
I’m not sure what OP is trying to create, but most Internet-in-a-box projects I’ve heard are trying to recreate text-centric sites offline (Reddit for example). I doubt they are trying to create an offline version of video sites, like YouTube. The size requirements alone make it unlikely.