Self Hosted Wikis¶
Choosing a wiki early on in a self-hosted setup is a great idea. Perhaps even before you have a dedicated server, having something in place to keep track of changes and create self-help pages for the home lab can help build the habit of writing things down before you wish you did.
As always, check out awesome-selfhosted but here are our favourites.
Tiddlywiki¶
As the Tiddlywiki website states that TiddlyWiki is "a non-linear personal web notebook". Because of the design of tiddlywiki, one could potentially argue it is better suited for those who like to write down a quick idea in order to come back later. It is able to be designed with contents, menus, and sub-menus.
The interface is a little utilitarian but it suits scatter brains rather well.
Thoughts from the show:
timestamp: 20:00-22:35
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Each "tiddler" (a note) can have one or more tags | Mentioned above: It's not the prettiest |
| Multiple tagged tiddlers can show up under multiple categories | Image uploads can be a pain. Upload as a sperate tiddler |
| Very lightweight application (40MiB of RAM at time of show) | Creating table of contents requires some manual work |
| Search is great |
wiki.js¶
Wiki.js is a somewhat more traditional wiki than Tiddlywiki in that it has dedicated pages organized by category, sub-category, etc. but with only one page per document that is linked. It also has a wonderful-looking interface that feels very modern.
Thoughts from the show:
timestamp: 16:15-19:00
These thoughts are reflective of the show on 2020-02-13, some things have probably changed since then.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Very Beautiful | Version 2 doesn't seem finished, lots of "coming soon" messages when clicking on something. |
| Search function works very well | "Site map coming soon" message. |
| GPL3 | Unable to add multiple tags showing up in multiple sections |
| 3 ways to host: Digital Ocean, AWS, self-hosted |
BookStack¶
The idea concept of BookStack can be thought of combining the logical world of wikis, with their hierarchical structure, and the physical world of a library. In most self-hosted scenarios this tends to be the defacto-choice in wikis. Most who use BookStack enjoy its intuitive philosophy of a shelf being a generic subject or category, a book being a specific part of that shelf, and chapters within the book containing the most specific information.
Thoughts from the show:
timestamp: 13:41-16:15
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Lots of people consider BookStack the "gold standard" of wikis | Could be spending a lot of time figuring out the best way for information to fit this structure. |
| Divide notes into logical structure, which may not be applicable to all notes. | By default allowable upload file sizes are quite small. Instructions on how to modify this can be found in the documentation. |
| Example usage: Shelf for servers, book for hardware, and chapters for specific servers. |
Honorable mention: GitBook¶
Thoughts from the show:
timestamp: 19:00-19:45
Used for the docs at linuxserver.io.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Has "fuzzy search" (words within documents, not just titles) | Not open source |
MkDocs¶
This wiki uses MkDocs! What you see is MkDocs using an theme called Material for MkDocs, but underneath is MkDocs.
MkDocs as mentioned is a static site generator, which means site changes must be edited, built, then deployed before changes can occur. Note the difference between this and a more traditional wiki would be that you could implement a change within the browser and on the page, save, and view the changes immediately on the public site.
These differences can be considered a pro or con depending on what you are looking for in a wiki.
Thoughts from the show:
timestamp: 23:00-26:20
Because it's git-based, git can be leveraged as a moderation tool via pull request model. Eg. Git blame who modified Chris Fisher's wiki page