Show HN: Realms Wiki – Simple Git-backed wiki inspired by Gollum | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Realms Wiki – Simple Git-backed wiki inspired by Gollum

realms.io

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We setup multiple[1] Gollum wikis at work, and had the following changes:

- Removed a bunch of features that were confusing to our non-dev users

- Used nginx/lua to do custom OAuth-based authentication [2]

- Set the committer's name and email to the currently authenticated user (from an env var in the request)

- Mucked around with the templates

- Added a /_status endpoint to do simple healthchecks for our load-balancer

- Extended `process_page_link_tag` to make it a bit more flexible when constructing links

- Added hipchat notifications for when pages are updated

Would be nice to see a system that allowed us to do the above, as we're not really all that in love with Gollum. The git part was great for our initial migration, not so great for wiki fault-tolerance...

[1] One for employees, one for freelancers, etc. [2] Blog post on oauth with nginx/lua here: http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/oauth-support-for-nginx-with-l...

I was thinking about forking gollum but I'm a ruby newb. I thought about leaving auth out but I think it might be useful to many people. I want the user to be able to disable it and use some kind of signed cookie based auth. I like the Nginx OAuth method, I will check it out, thanks.

Inspired by Gollum, Ghost, and Dillinger

What are those? Gollum is a wiki[1], yes? Ghost is the new blogging platform[2]? What's Dillinger?

[1] https://github.com/gollum/gollum

[2] https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost

Markdown editor

http://dillinger.io/

Probably a good time to mention similar alternatives that I liked a bit better than Gollum such as:

https://www.branchable.com/

and

http://gitit.net/

Gitit is awesome, it uses pandoc so its trivial to export your page to PDF (using latex), ODT, S5 presentations, etc.

Branchable is a hosting service. The wiki software it uses is http://ikiwiki.info

What like about ikiwiki is that instead of always running as daemon, it's launched via a git post-update hook. After regenerating static html for the content you've changed it's done. It does support editing content via a web interface, but all that needs is CGI. The downside is that you need a thorough understanding of unix permissions to make it work.

https://ikiwiki.info/rcs/git/

Kind of curious why the suggested way of installing is directly into the root python install. I figured it would have some sort of guide using virtualenv. I did see a requirements.txt in the repo, so I tried installing it in a virtual environment myself but had some issues compiling some modules (Tried both 2.7 and 3.4). I gave up at that point because it was more trouble than it was worth.

I really like the idea of this wiki as well as the look of it. I could definitely see myself using this in the future. I had spent some time a couple months ago looking into what Flask-based wikis were available but my results turned up very little. I'll definitely be watching this repo as it grows.

The suggested install is the install.sh file. It creates a virtualenv and installs the pip packages. Although I only tested with ubuntu 14.04. Did you use the script? what kind of errors did you get? I admit I do need to document the install process better, I hope to create dist packages to make it easier as well.

Ok, maybe someone would want to check the Smallest Federated Wiki: https://github.com/fedwiki/wiki-node

I like the concept of the split-screen markdown editor, I had some pretty decent success with non-technical people when we were using jottit for some RPG background documentation. Definitely going to take a look at that, especially if the prerequisites (both packages/daemons and mem/cpu) aren't too high for a low-end VPS.

It's currently running on a $5 digital ocean vps. Didn't have any issues today.

Having just spent the past two days searching around for a git-backed python-based markdown-enabled personal wiki...I am so stoked that one just popped up here. Very cool!

I'm loading up with Vagrant right now. Any thoughts on dockerizing it?

Yes, I will create a Dockerfile and upload an image to the hub.

Can this be run over SSL out of the box, or do I need to wrap it up somehow ?

It may be possible but I would recommend putting Nginx in front of it for SSL or general production use.

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