I tried to run Wiki.js in the past but it's really buggy and has a lot of spinners/loading pages for what is supposed to be simple html pages so i've been looking for a good self-hosted alternative since.
I love how there are so many options in the HN comments, and some of them look really good as well, however I still struggle to believe that none of them are self-contained. All of them require a a redis container, a postgres container, a frontend proxy etc.. for a simple wiki? can't the wiki run it's own redis-cache internally, maybe run with sqlite? Have all the oauth/proxy stuff optional?
In the meantime i've been running with mkdocs but since it's a site generator but it's not really user friendly as you need to redeploy to see changes, etc..
You're looking for Dokuwiki. It doesn't even need a database; pages are stored as plain text files on disk. Its appearance is a little dated, but it seems to work very well.
MediaWiki. Is there something wrong with the solution powering Wikipedia? It’s very simple to set up, and you can one-click deploy it on DigitalOcean for $10/month.
We used Dokuwiki in a similar situation. It's been a few years since I last used it (new client uses confluence) but I remember it was super easy to connect external tools. If your script can output text, Dokuwiki can display it :)
Is this a good choice for a company? These sorts of "hacker" solutions inevitably fall flat because people want a bunch of bells and whistles and don't mind things like never being able to find anything (arguably the single most important feature of a wiki) or being able to integrate their documentation with other systems.
It integrated well with our LDAP server. Its search is great, and everything is plain text so you can do whatever you like. It has a rich text editor but you can also edit plain text.
I have a docuwiki running on RPi at home (files are stored on a USB-connected HDD) as a personal knowledge management system. It doesn't even need any DB, just stores it in text files. Took just a few minutes to set up. Doesn't get any simpler (other than using plain text files on local of course :)
I've stuck with Git based markdown wikis. Nice thing is that when the web app you were relying on enevitably dies the data format is portable.
Currently using Gitea's built in per-repo wiki as a general wiki after we migrated from Gitlab to self hosted Gitea. As a bonus there's no maintenance burden, Gitea itself has super low maintenance burden, single portable binary (I use an APT repo), single config. Latency of Navigating Gitea is also instant by comparison to Gitlab which was driving us nuts it's so slow.
As much as I hate it, I think Confluence is the right choice for startups. (Or Github Wiki if you can stomach it). It's free to start, and you get 10 users. By the time you have 10 people who need access, (and you can export PDF's of pages if you have one off sharing to do) you pay $50/mo. If you have 10 employees $50/mo is pocket lint.
My problem with Confluence is that I want a wiki primarily to be able to find information, and secondarily to store information, and I can never find anything in Confluence. The search function seems to be optimized for maximum frustration.
I cannot for a minute believe that search over a few hundreds/thousands of documents is anything less than a solved problem these days. Confluence is another level of bad, but I'm sure some software does search well.
Can highly recommend outline (https://www.getoutline.com/). You can self-host or opt for the hosted version. Built and maintained by one of the linear devs.
I cannot recall why i did not go for wiki.js myself, I tried, but I kept looking. Ended up with https://docmost.com/ and I've been quite happy. It's probably more equal to Notion then Wikipedia, but as a internal knowledge base it seem to be hit the right spot in terms simplicity and features.
I can't believe at this day, many products don't care about mobile viewing.
I thought it makes a big sense to write documents on PC and then view it elsewhere out there but developers don't seem to care about that usage.
Docmost makes tables completely unreadable on mobile having words wrap at the width of the device, especially when set as full-width which actually makes it even tighter for some odd reason.
Affine doesn't even support mobile at all and the GitHub issue about it is starting to age well.
AppFlowy does it the best of the bunch but it requires an app and it has minimal tablet support having only mobile app view than a native tablet view but at least it's usable having tables actually horizontally scroll as anyone would expect.
Outline isn't any better and a small test showed some weird behavior under mobile.
All in all, this guide is pretty small. More of a solution overview than a guide. I would have appreciated if the steps in the "Making It Production-Ready" section were expanded upon, for example.
It takes very little resources on my Raspberry Pi and is built to be extensible and safe through its transparent way of storing wiki pages as markdown files.
Especially for small startups, https://typemill.net can be a handy solution, since it is very lightweight and can also produce handbooks in PDF format.
Why not just use Google Drive or Office 365? You probably have one of them anyway, people know how to use it, and all the access control features are built in. Plus you can easily export all your docs and just put them on an ftp server in the worst case.
I looked at wiki.js and I don't understand why you wouldn't just install Mediawiki. It only takes a few minutes and wiki.js doesn't look any more sophisticated at a glance.
I agree. MediaWiki is a solid solution and is very easy to setup. You can one-click deploy on DigitalOcean for $10/month and just enable daily snapshots. You can even use a managed DB if you want.
I tried to run Wiki.js in the past but it's really buggy and has a lot of spinners/loading pages for what is supposed to be simple html pages so i've been looking for a good self-hosted alternative since.
I love how there are so many options in the HN comments, and some of them look really good as well, however I still struggle to believe that none of them are self-contained. All of them require a a redis container, a postgres container, a frontend proxy etc.. for a simple wiki? can't the wiki run it's own redis-cache internally, maybe run with sqlite? Have all the oauth/proxy stuff optional?
In the meantime i've been running with mkdocs but since it's a site generator but it's not really user friendly as you need to redeploy to see changes, etc..
You're looking for Dokuwiki. It doesn't even need a database; pages are stored as plain text files on disk. Its appearance is a little dated, but it seems to work very well.
MediaWiki. Is there something wrong with the solution powering Wikipedia? It’s very simple to set up, and you can one-click deploy it on DigitalOcean for $10/month.
We used Dokuwiki in a similar situation. It's been a few years since I last used it (new client uses confluence) but I remember it was super easy to connect external tools. If your script can output text, Dokuwiki can display it :)
https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki
EDIT: I decided to try dokuwiki in Podman, works nicely as long as you run:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/debug-rootless-podman-mounted...Is this a good choice for a company? These sorts of "hacker" solutions inevitably fall flat because people want a bunch of bells and whistles and don't mind things like never being able to find anything (arguably the single most important feature of a wiki) or being able to integrate their documentation with other systems.
It integrated well with our LDAP server. Its search is great, and everything is plain text so you can do whatever you like. It has a rich text editor but you can also edit plain text.
I have a docuwiki running on RPi at home (files are stored on a USB-connected HDD) as a personal knowledge management system. It doesn't even need any DB, just stores it in text files. Took just a few minutes to set up. Doesn't get any simpler (other than using plain text files on local of course :)
Plus phenomenal pandoc support enables conversion from many formats to DokuWiki
> is quite lightweight and can run smoothly on a modest server with:
>4GB RAM
> 2 vCPU
Crazy what is considered modest now a days.
I've stuck with Git based markdown wikis. Nice thing is that when the web app you were relying on enevitably dies the data format is portable.
Currently using Gitea's built in per-repo wiki as a general wiki after we migrated from Gitlab to self hosted Gitea. As a bonus there's no maintenance burden, Gitea itself has super low maintenance burden, single portable binary (I use an APT repo), single config. Latency of Navigating Gitea is also instant by comparison to Gitlab which was driving us nuts it's so slow.
As much as I hate it, I think Confluence is the right choice for startups. (Or Github Wiki if you can stomach it). It's free to start, and you get 10 users. By the time you have 10 people who need access, (and you can export PDF's of pages if you have one off sharing to do) you pay $50/mo. If you have 10 employees $50/mo is pocket lint.
My problem with Confluence is that I want a wiki primarily to be able to find information, and secondarily to store information, and I can never find anything in Confluence. The search function seems to be optimized for maximum frustration.
I completely agree with you. I’ve literally searched for page titles and had confluence tell me there’s no results found.
I’ve found this problem exists (even though it’s worse with confluence) no matter what you use, and the solution is a better hierarchy
I cannot for a minute believe that search over a few hundreds/thousands of documents is anything less than a solved problem these days. Confluence is another level of bad, but I'm sure some software does search well.
Agreed. Overall I find Confluence an anti-pattern and just obnoxious.
Can highly recommend outline (https://www.getoutline.com/). You can self-host or opt for the hosted version. Built and maintained by one of the linear devs.
Agreed on outline, though their lack of local auth is kinda annoying. But Authelia works pretty great.
I tend to abuse fossil for it's wiki. Mainly because it is zero fuss to setup.
https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/wikitheory.wiki
I would have liked that too, except that I can't get oAuth integrated with fossil.
That would solve so many problems.
Sit it behind oauth2-proxy?
We tried many different wiki softwares before settling on Bookstack.
https://www.bookstackapp.com/
I cannot recall why i did not go for wiki.js myself, I tried, but I kept looking. Ended up with https://docmost.com/ and I've been quite happy. It's probably more equal to Notion then Wikipedia, but as a internal knowledge base it seem to be hit the right spot in terms simplicity and features.
I can't believe at this day, many products don't care about mobile viewing.
I thought it makes a big sense to write documents on PC and then view it elsewhere out there but developers don't seem to care about that usage.
Docmost makes tables completely unreadable on mobile having words wrap at the width of the device, especially when set as full-width which actually makes it even tighter for some odd reason.
Affine doesn't even support mobile at all and the GitHub issue about it is starting to age well.
AppFlowy does it the best of the bunch but it requires an app and it has minimal tablet support having only mobile app view than a native tablet view but at least it's usable having tables actually horizontally scroll as anyone would expect.
Outline isn't any better and a small test showed some weird behavior under mobile.
Docmost founder here.
Thanks for reporting the mobile table issue. I will have a look at it.
The fullwidth issue on mobile was recently reported. It will be fixed soon.
I appreciate your feedback.
Authentication options are very limited with docmost, compared to other offerings. There is only one. Locally stored credentials.
For PHP/Laravel, there is an excellent wiki tool that I have used:
https://www.bookstackapp.com/
If you're not averse to PHP, why wouldn't you use MediaWiki?
All in all, this guide is pretty small. More of a solution overview than a guide. I would have appreciated if the steps in the "Making It Production-Ready" section were expanded upon, for example.
I ended up building my own Wiki in Go at some point, although I use this mainly for my own smaller purposes. Description and demo instance at:
https://wiki.gnoack.org/UkuleleWeb
It takes very little resources on my Raspberry Pi and is built to be extensible and safe through its transparent way of storing wiki pages as markdown files.
Why not use Wikipedia's software? Is it too cumbersome?
MediaWiki on a VPS is comfy. Installation is easy. Plus you get to make the original wiki skin the default for the authentic wiki experience.
Alas, the actual original skin doesn't get much use anymore (the one at https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage )
Especially for small startups, https://typemill.net can be a handy solution, since it is very lightweight and can also produce handbooks in PDF format.
+1 for wiki.js, I have it and Gogs (git server) running on my Arch VM. Very lightweight services, and setup was a breeze for both.
Why not just use Google Drive or Office 365? You probably have one of them anyway, people know how to use it, and all the access control features are built in. Plus you can easily export all your docs and just put them on an ftp server in the worst case.
Now that Google docs has tabs...
Another alternative that solves similar issues is Docusaurus: https://docusaurus.io/
you’ll need to increase the resources to atleast
"Atleast" isn't a word.
I looked at wiki.js and I don't understand why you wouldn't just install Mediawiki. It only takes a few minutes and wiki.js doesn't look any more sophisticated at a glance.
I agree. MediaWiki is a solid solution and is very easy to setup. You can one-click deploy on DigitalOcean for $10/month and just enable daily snapshots. You can even use a managed DB if you want.