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How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup

The Mythical Engineer
Nov 17, 2024

     


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When it comes to setting up a wiki for your startup, you've probably
looked at popular options like Confluence and Notion. While these
tools are feature-rich, there's one major drawback: they can get
expensive really fast.

Most of these services charge per user per month (typically around
$5), and even with enterprise negotiations, the costs can add up
quickly as your team grows. Sure, they offer advanced features and
granular access controls, but let's be honest - most startups don't
need all those fancy features.

This is where self-hosted solutions shine. Your costs stay fixed
regardless of how many employees join your company. After running a
self-hosted wiki in production for over 3 years, I can confidently
recommend Wiki.js as an excellent alternative to paid softwares.

Why Wiki.js?

Setting up Wiki.js is surprisingly simple - you can have it running
in minutes using Docker Compose. The basic setup (Wiki.js +
PostgreSQL) is quite lightweight and can run smoothly on a modest
server with:

  * 4GB RAM
  * 2 vCPU

If you want better search capabilities, you can add Elasticsearch as
well, but you'll need to increase the resources to atleast:

  * 8GB RAM
  * 2 vCPU

In our case, we've grown to over 1,000 pages and nearly 400 users,
and our setup is still going strong. The only maintenance I've had to
do was adding Elasticsearch for improved search functionality.

elasticsearch_setup

Cost Comparison

Let's talk numbers. Here's what you might pay running this on AWS
EC2:

 Instance  vCPU  RAM  On-Demand   Monthly      Reserved     Monthly
   Type         (GiB)   ($/hr)   On-Demand  1-year ($/hr)   Reserved
t4g.medium 2    4     $0.0224    $16.35     $0.0142        $10.37
t4g.large  2    8     $0.0448    $32.70     $0.0283        $20.66

To put this in perspective: if you had 400 users on a typical paid
wiki platform charging $5 per user, you'd be looking at a $2,000+
monthly bill.

With a self-hosted solution, you will be paying less than $33/month
even with the larger instance!

If you do need to scale up later, you can take small maintenance
downtime to increase the instance size, or you can split the
elasticsearch to a different instance.

Making It Production-Ready

To transform this into a production-ready setup, I recommend
implementing the following things:

 1. Set up a custom domain like wiki.yourcompany.com
 2. Configure DNS and a Load Balancer to handle traffic
 3. Implement SSO with Google
 4. Restrict self-registration to your company domain (e.g.,
    yourcompany.com)
 5. Set up hourly AMI backups of your EC2 instance

The Setup

Here's the Docker Compose file you can use to do the complete setup:

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:16.4
    expose:
      - 5432
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - db-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: wiki
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: pass # Change this to a strong password
      POSTGRES_USER: root

  wiki:
    image: requarks/wiki:2.5
    depends_on:
      - db
    environment:
      DB_TYPE: postgres
      DB_HOST: db
      DB_PORT: 5432
      DB_USER: root
      DB_PASS: pass # Change this to a strong password
      DB_NAME: wiki
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "80:3000"

  elasticsearch:
    image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.17.23
    container_name: elasticsearch
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 127.0.0.1:9200:9200
    environment:
      - discovery.type=single-node
      - xpack.security.enabled=false
      - xpack.security.http.ssl.enabled=false
      - xpack.license.self_generated.type=basic

volumes:
  db-data:

P.S. One of my friend is looking for a job in Product / Marketing &
Operations / Data Analytics Role. He has good background in data
analytics, mathematics and finance. He's currently located in
Bangalore, India, open to relocate and work in-office setup. If
you're looking out for a great candidate, please connect directly to
candidate on Phone, Email or Linkedin. Please find the resume link
here


#wiki  #documentation  #postgres  #elasticsearch  #docker  #startup 
#aws  #ec2 


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* Setup a Production Redis Cluster

* How Postgres Triggers Can Simplify Your Backend Development

* Running Rust Kernel in Deepnote

* Docker Pull Too Many Requests

* Setup a production Redis standalone server

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