Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend | Hacker News Reader

Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

github.com

268 pointsdsr1239 comments

Fun to see this on HN! I originally created Gollum to power GitHub's wiki system and wanted to see if we could use Git to make our wikis more powerful AND more open. I thought it would be cool if you could just clone your GitHub wiki and modify it locally or export it to some other system if you needed, or have it all locally for an airplane trip without wifi.

Another interesting thing is that I used my Readme Driven Development method to develop it, which you can see in the Readme of the first commit: https://github.com/gollum/gollum/commit/c7875704971be998a539.... I wrote it before writing a single line of code and found it worked nicely to figure out the API and feel out the ergonomics of the text format. More on that approach here: https://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-deve...

Glad to see the project alive and well!

I never knew that my default approach is called readme-driven development :)

I guess building from specifications is so rare in software, we forgot how it's called.

  nano-waterfall  (nWF) - README.md -Driven Development
  micro-waterfall (μWF) - ARCHITECTURE.md -Driven Development
  mini-waterfall  (mWF) - plan→build (iterate)→ship
  full waterfool  (FWF) - "you went full waterfool, never go full waterfool"

I had forgotten you wrote both Jekyll *and* Gollum.

I'm writing the next generation of Jekyll, called Svekyll, which is Jekyll plus Svelte: "the radical simplicity of Jekyll + the futuristic power of Svelte"

https://svekyll.com

I know it has been hard for you to get in on the ground floor of things, but this is your chance if you want to invest. I'm building a publishing company with Svekyll as the starting point, but with a few extra twists coming soon. Could we jump on a call and I'll share the roadmap?

I skimmed the README and didn't find a way for Gollum to export to static HTML files only for viewing purposes, say hosting on GitHub/GitLab pages.

I've been looking for a similarly simplistic git-based wiki which works much like Jekyll/Pelican/Hugo.

I like the look of this a lot, particularly the support for running-from-local. I think git is such an ideal backend for something like a wiki, where multiple contributors and version history are both so important.

Tangent: how do HN folks generally do technical wikis -- or really, just keep track of the technical details of your software -- in large software development organizations?

My org uses Confluence for some stuff, Github pages and READMEs for others. It's... fine. It's not the worst I've ever seen, you can find some useful stuff with a little bit of work and some knowledge about where to look, but it's still very likely that whatever you're reading is either outdated or now-irrelevant.

How do you (and your team) solve the challenge of keeping documentation actually relevant and up-to-date when there are so many people writing so much code, then leaving two years later?

I always find Confluence to be the place where docs go to die. There's very little motivation to keep it up to date and tends to be one or two people driving it. When they move to another team or job, then it gets abandoned.

The things my team uses GitHub pages for tends to do better because devs don't object too heavily to writing code comments (for generated docs), markdown (for design docs), or API specs (for API docs). The last two in particular have become a big part of the design process, so it's been bought into heavily. Whether those stand the test of time remains to be seen - they're relatively new.

My problem with docs in repos is it isn't as smooth to edit, especially if you have to wait for reviews.

You can always just make the semantics of the doc folder or repo push permissions match what you're looking for, ie. 'no real reviews necessary to push to master' if that's the semantics you're looking for.

I agree that this is actually a much bigger deal than it would initially seem.

Any kind of friction is a huge problem when it comes to a task that people are already sort of reluctant to do; just the thought of "ah, fuck, I gotta get two reviews just to add a couple lines of setup instructions?" makes people way less likely to update repo docs as frequently as they need to.

> I always find Confluence to be the place where docs go to die

Yeah... I'm not a big fan either. Currently in my team we just use google docs for more dynamic stuff, and have a wiki page with links to all docs. Otherwise we know that people won't bother editing

I remember seeing somewhere GDoc to Markdown converter.

After the initial discussion is finished, the Google doc can be converted to the [Github-flavored] Markdown and stored in the [Github] repo.

It would be a good idea to create an initial GDoc based on the markdown template from the repo.

Frankly with the speed of Github innovation, they will be adding GDoc-like commenting and collaboration soon.

Not sure how it can be integrated with git branches though.

To me Confluence's problem is the not-very-relevant search, which either gives me generic blank documents that someone created as a placeholder (?!? -- I've started suffixing these with (blank)) or fails to find synonyms or related words when I can't quite come up with the exact search term (wonder if these "related words or synonyms" could be manually added...)

I'm sure it is a difficult problem but I haven't really found any good solutions other than "make really long titles that use many words to describe the content" or "Add lots of tags" and even them I'm not sure it helps or not. Does the search take into account click-through rate? Link count?

> gives me generic blank documents that someone created as a placeholder ... fails to find synonyms or related words ... Add lots of tags

These kinds of problems can be solved using neural networks as the foundation for search (variously termed "neural information retrieval" and "semantic search"). I worked on this at Google Research from 2016-2020, before launching ZIR AI in 2020 to make neural search available as a PaaS, just like Elasticsearch and Algolia have done for keyword matching.

Here are a couple of introductory pieces if you're interested in learning more:

[1] https://blog.zir-ai.com/the-high-cost-of-keyword-search, "The High Cost of Keyword Search"

[2] https://blog.zir-ai.com/semantic-search-helps-chatbots-answe... "Semantic search helps chatbots answer more questions"

I concur about confluence being where things die. There's a dev on our team that is very big on confluence whereas I'm not. Ironically, I am big on documenting our public methods from the perspective of a user of our library whereas he puts javadocs on private methods. He has more experience than I do, so I don't fight him on it, but man do I find it futile.

We use self-hosted Readthedocs [0] with git/repo integration - merge to master triggers a build.

[0] https://readthedocs.org/

Gitea supports web-based wikis that are git repos on the backend.

It also has a good auth system and supports U2F (or SSO).

Unless that has changed recently, gitea doesn’t provide any way to search a wiki (!), making it quite useless for documentation.

Notion.

I would love to have something like Notion but using git for all data storage and edit history.

There is https://stackedit.io/ offering it but I stopped using it because of bugs when trying to edit on mobile. And it basically abandoned for the last 2 years https://github.com/benweet/stackedit (only some deps updates, nothing more).

There is only one way to make documention works. This is to have everyone following the same standards. This is not enough of course.

You can have different people using different tools to write it, but all those documents needs to be referenced at the same place and be searchable at least by title. There is no magic tool this is first a people/process problem

If your org has several place to find it and no strategy. Then the first step is to have a documentation strategy. That will not solve all your issues, but without it you are going to be very limited

I use GitHub wiki’s but they’re not perfect and I think about this a lot.

I’ve been thinking about building something like Slack but for documentation instead of conversation. A git repo is a great way to store your files so that you have history, backups, and avoid vendor lock-in.

I like to write docs with Jekyll in the same repository of the code, not in separate repository as in GitHub. In this way I can document the changes in a feature branch and leave unchanged the docs in the release branch. Then the changes get merged when we release the feature.

A customer of mine writes documentation in Google Sites (horrible UX and not for for this task, they eventually realized it) and my pages (Bitbucket) are linked from the table of contents (release branch). To read the documentation for a new feature one must know the name of the feature branch.

I wrote a book for O'Reilly about GitHub and their API and for some reason no one noticed that we added a chapter on Gollum (there isn't an API to access Gollum on github). It was the weakest one of the chapters, IMHO, but, you know, deadlines. O'Reilly was gracious enough to release it under CC, so you can read that chapter (and the whole book actually) here:

https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/chapter-03-goll...

There is a section on using Rugged, the ruby git library and how you can use that with Gollum.

https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/chapter-03-goll...

While writing this book, I found it really fascinating to learn about how git works by trying to manage a Gollum wiki. For example, if you add an image to multiple places in a repository, it only needs to store it once because git can tell it is already in there.

https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/chapter-03-goll...

If you're new to Gollum, it's the software that powers GitHub's wiki tab in the repo view.

Gollum was one of the first Markdown wikis and still is a fantastic choice for running a Git Markdown-powered wiki. I ran a number of technical documentation sites on Gollum, and one of the things that set it apart was hackability. It was easy to modify it to do very custom things based on our site's needs.

Are you sure? This statement in the docs makes it sound like it’s more of a clone.

> Gollum strives to be compatible with GitHub wikis (see --lenient-tag-lookup)

Edit: Looks like the answer is yes if you look at just /gollum.

> Gollum is a simple wiki system built on top of Git that powers GitHub Wikis.

Interesting!

Isn't it better to couple the documentation of a project to the source (e.g. in a `docs/` sub-directory) and just use markdown?

Yep. GitLab's support for Mermaid in markdown is pretty nice. I'm looking into making my experiments with a Kroki server more official, at which point we'll have a robust platform for markdown-based, repo-internal, embedded-diagram-supporting docs.

My docs often end up being related to multiple repos. So, although I want my docs in git, I’d prefer them to be their own repo.

Wiki.js [1] is quite mature and nice as well, supporting bidirectional Git sync, a GraphQL api and search!

[1] https://js.wiki/

I have a strange obsession with git-powered wikis. I've spent time playing around with most of the popular ones and I think it's basically the perfect documentation format. However they all have their quirks and each one seems to be missing some major feature I want and it takes an unreal amount of self-control for me to not just throw my hands up and create my own, adding yet another one to the mix.

Is there anything other than ikiwiki which works as a "wiki compiler" producing static html?

This was a fun weekend project. Thanks!

I will say, however, that getting it running took minutes; getting auth running was nearly a full day. Just HTTP Basic auth had me writing Ruby, then giving up and using a library that hasn't seen a single commit in years.

I’ve been using Gollum on my local machine for personal wikis and it’s great!

So many versions and rewrites of wikis.

github even has their own wiki system.

None of them support pull requests. (wikipedia supports patch/diff style manual change requests done via talk pages which is sorta gets you there, but not quite the github style automated pull request work flow i'd love to see supported)

Its honestly a shame.

I've used gitit and it is pretty nice. Why do we need another one of these?

> gitit is pretty nice. Why do we need another one of these?

Gollum and Gitit have both been around for more than a decade. Thousands of stars, hundreds of forks, and active commit histories spanning more than ten years suggests the world views both as of value.

If this program has been around for 10 years, then unless there is some news about it, it should have (2011) or whatever in the link title.

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