Outline – An Open Source Team Knowledgebase | Hacker News Reader

Outline – An Open Source Team Knowledgebase

github.com

28 pointsslightknack8 comments

Good old DokuWiki[1] has few dependencies (not even a database), is super easy to set up without Docker and comes with a zillion useful plugins. Its wiki markup format is supported both for import and export by pandoc.

Just saying...

[1] https://www.dokuwiki.org/

The better thing about dokuwiki is that it's easy to maintain. The documentation tells you all the data/Metadata directories you need to backup. I messed my install somehow the other day and it was easier to backup those data directories and start a clean install. And it's also easy to backup the data to git since it's just text, and that's what I do.

Docuwiki is great. I would also like to throw in mkdocs into this documentation mix, with the mkdoc-material plugin. It does require python to generate the static site files for the documentation, but the actual documentation site are just static files that can be served by Nginx. Also mkdocs has a really wonderful development server that allows you to see the changes you are making after each time you save the file. Looks really nice and modern too.

Mandatory Google or shudders Slack account for registration without any other option? Why?

If anyone is after a different approach, or alternative requirements, I've been working on BookStack [1] for the last few years in my free time.

[1] https://www.bookstackapp.com/

The self-hosted requirements are pretty hefty.

Node.js >= 12 Postgres >=9.5 Redis >= 4 AWS S3 storage bucket for media and other attachments Slack or Google developer application for authentication

Requiring Postgres and Redis for a documentation site seems overkill. Also not a fan of requiring S3, an option to save the media to the local disk would be nice. This seems somewhat over-engineered for a knowledgebase, especially when some of the competition has no runtime requirements other than a webserver (DokuWiki, statically generated Gatsby/Hugo sites). And I can still get Slack notifications on edit from MR notifications.

Outline looks clean and very similar to Notion. We use Notion in our company. Wondering if Outline could be a cheaper alternative (and with an API).

I'd recommend giving "DynaList" a look as well. Use it daily.

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