BookStack: Simple and Free Wiki Software | Hacker News Reader

BookStack: Simple and Free Wiki Software

bookstackapp.com

127 pointsstefankuehnel27 comments

Thanks for sharing my project! I started building BookStack just over 9 years ago to suit a need at work, and have been improving & maintaining it since. I left full time employment three years ago and have been focusing on BookStack since, with my living costs now covered via project donations, sponsorships & support services, and the growth of these continue as shown in my blogpost here: https://www.bookstackapp.com/blog/9-years-of-bookstack/#fina....

The platform has been designed for ease-of-use, with mixed-technical-skill workplace use in mind. The design and content structure is (purposefully) quite opinionated though so does not suit all use-cases, but for many it works quite well.

Technically it's built as quite a technically simple PHP/Laravel/MySQL stack with custom JavaScript sprinkled in where needed. The default WYSIWYG editor is TinyMCE based, although due to TinyMCE license changes I'm currently building a lexical-fork-based new editor.

If you'd like to understand the project more, a project FAQ can be found on our site here: https://www.bookstackapp.com/about/project-faq/

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please consider it bringing it into debian and/or guix. :)

The software is platform abstract, I've ran it on Debian & Ubuntu, RHEL & Fedora, Arch, OpenBSD and Windows systems. I stay out of system specific packaging methods though to avoid the extra maintenance burden, although community offers do form to enable this in some cases (like with BookStack in Arch's AUR).

BookStack is great if you're small. There's no file locking/conduct management when two people are editing the same page and there's no co-authoring. I used it for docs at a startup I was in around 2018 and this lack of feature really got in our way once we grew to more than 10 people.

The feature is still missing today, I get email updates from the same ancient GitHub issue often of people asking for it and the dev responding that they don't like the idea of systematically preventing conflicts. Which is fair, if I had the skill and inclination I would have forked the project and just done it myself. But I'm not a software engineer, so I had no choice but to use different software that fit my needs.

If you're a really small shop BookStack has a very nice and clean UI and is a great wiki-type offering. At any kind of scale the cracks start to show, though.

We use it at work and its ok. Missing permalinks and the permission concept does not fit our usecase.

If it had some review process - that would be some kind of killerfeature

Bookstack has been awesome for helping me build out my tabletop roleplay campaigns with friends and for storing recipes. Funnily enough, these are things where a “book” metaphor really makes sense! My spouse uses it has a general knowledge base for their projects and all sorts of topics.

Are there more featureful and flexible wiki softwares out there? Sure. But Bookstack is my favorite by far because 1) I never feel lost and overwhelmed by the amorphous structure and dizzying array of features I don’t need and 2) it is the easiest to self-host and maintain of the many self-hosted wikis I trialed in my homelab ~5 years ago.

Outline is another great wiki that I have been self-hosting for a couple years now: https://github.com/outline/outline

It’s a bit of a pain to set up and self host the container stack but Outline has been great for me. Does anyone have experience with using Outline as a public facing docs/blog site?

What exactly is a pain there? There's a docker compose file in the documentation that will tell you everything: https://docs.getoutline.com/s/hosting/doc/docker-7pfeLP5a8t

How does it handle tables? If it uses markdown and expects us to edit the tables in the markdown format, I'll stay away from it.

Would be great if we could actually export a book as pdf or in a format that could be printed or worked on in book publishing software. I could not find that option, is it available?

Having tried this (when searching for a self-hosted documentation system), I abandoned it due to the inability to change the reference to the book-specific-nomenclature. Still, a nice project in all other regards. (I ended up using Notion due to its flexibility, but still hope for a self-hosted notion clone).

It’s look gorgeous, it feels gorgeous, but I’m sadly stuck in my organization because the OAuth support doesn’t expose enough knobs. (I.e. what if it isn’t OIDC? What if it requires one non-standard scope and nothing else? What if there’s no encryption key seemingly to be found? Etc.)

It's a very nice project, I hope a day they choose to support PostgreSQL and SQLite though, they are much more popular these days and chances you already use both, just need to add a DB are high.

We use this at my company and I'm a fan!

In a nutshell, how is this different from MediaWiki, the software used by Wikipedia?

It's concept is not wiki but book. You aren't as lost as in a Wiki. Works great as a digital manual

It's transclusion-based/index-based so essentially you crate a master-index (a shelve of books) and start develop books chapters, you can split them in as many pages as you like, combine pages by transclusion, linking subpages etc still maintaining a kind of tree-like structure. Of course with full-text search, multi-user support etc like MediaWiki.

I love free book browsing and hosting. This looks like a good project.

That’s not what this is. This is Wiki software in which content is arranged into “books” (sections or categories). It has nothing to do with actual books.

Good to see simple wiki / confluence alternatives. But confluence is here to stay, with all it's rich features.

I switched jobs and thus move away from confluence to ADO wiki and life is never endingly painful for internal knowledge management!

Either there are 100s of word docx or there's confluence that can be easily queried, with various other capabilities using it's plugins for draw.io and mermaid.js.

Markdown for large tables is just silly and hard to maintain. AsciiDoc is great, but a bit too much for docs that are shared with product teams.

Haven't found anything Confluence does Notion wouldn't be capable of.

I think you use confluence because it integrates with jira, and you use jira because it integrates with bitbucket and your software lifecycle / change control management processes, and you have those because you've got compliance requirements and the tooling needs to be managed by people who don't want to get deeply invested in some complex DSL when a visual workflow builder's "good enough"

See also "nobody uses elasticsearch because they like lucene queries; they use it because everyone likes using kibana and tolerate lucene."

(There are probably people who specifically like features of confluence or elasticsearch; most use it because they like / must use other parts of the ecosystem and feature/product N is good enough)

[edited to finish the thought about jira's workflow management]

>See also "nobody uses elasticsearch because they like lucene queries; they use it because everyone likes using kibana and tolerate lucene."

there are lots of usecases for ElasticSearch without Kibana. in my area it is >90% ElasticSearch without Kibana (nor Grafana)

I suspect very few people "start with Kibana to solve some streaming data search problem and discovery they love ElasticSearch / lucene" and similarly very few people who seek out features on top of lucene say "and another major selling point to using ElasticSearch for this project is that we'll also be able to search the database with Kibana"

And if Notion were open source I’d migrate to it.

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