[HN Gopher] How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
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       How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup
        
       Author : sks147
       Score  : 95 points
       Date   : 2024-11-17 08:14 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (themythicalengineer.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (themythicalengineer.com)
        
       | torvald wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | mekster wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | Pi9h wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | cheema33 wrote:
         | Authentication options are very limited with docmost, compared
         | to other offerings. There is only one. Locally stored
         | credentials.
        
       | bloopernova wrote:
       | 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:                 podman unshare chown 1000:1000
       | /path/to/wiki/data
       | 
       | https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/debug-rootless-podman-mounted...
        
         | drillsteps5 wrote:
         | 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 :)
        
         | hyperific wrote:
         | Plus phenomenal pandoc support enables conversion from many
         | formats to DokuWiki
        
         | stavros wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | bloopernova wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | stavros wrote:
             | Nice, thank you!
        
       | somat wrote:
       | 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
        
         | thunderbong wrote:
         | I would have liked that too, except that I can't get oAuth
         | integrated with fossil.
         | 
         | That would solve so many problems.
        
           | cyberpunk wrote:
           | Sit it behind oauth2-proxy?
        
       | SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
       | Another alternative that solves similar issues is Docusaurus:
       | https://docusaurus.io/
        
       | thunderbong wrote:
       | We tried many different wiki softwares before settling on
       | Bookstack.
       | 
       | https://www.bookstackapp.com/
        
       | maklu wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | client4 wrote:
         | Agreed on outline, though their lack of local auth is kinda
         | annoying. But Authelia works pretty great.
        
         | moepstar wrote:
         | Another vote for Outline - it works really well, has
         | ,,multiplayer" support (although that is only a nicety in my
         | book), is constantly improved.
         | 
         | Also, Dokuwiki is nice, if a little dated on the UI side of
         | things.
        
         | tommoor wrote:
         | Outline maintainer here, happy to see the rec and can answer
         | any questions
        
       | trendschau wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | quintin wrote:
       | Why not use Wikipedia's software? Is it too cumbersome?
        
         | HeckFeck wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | bawolff wrote:
           | Alas, the actual original skin doesn't get much use anymore
           | (the one at https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage )
        
       | zeroCalories wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | 4b11b4 wrote:
         | Now that Google docs has tabs...
        
           | grogenaut wrote:
           | does it have vertical tabs within horizontal yet?
        
       | mise_en_place wrote:
       | +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.
        
       | snozolli wrote:
       | _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.
        
         | movedx wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | crabmusket wrote:
         | You seem to be copping alot of flak for that comment
        
       | maccard wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | stavros wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | movedx wrote:
           | Agreed. Overall I find Confluence an anti-pattern and just
           | obnoxious.
        
           | maccard wrote:
           | 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
        
             | stavros wrote:
             | 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.
        
       | gnoack wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | codegeek wrote:
       | For PHP/Laravel, there is an excellent wiki tool that I have
       | used:
       | 
       | https://www.bookstackapp.com/
        
         | cibyr wrote:
         | If you're not averse to PHP, why wouldn't you use MediaWiki?
        
         | kkfx wrote:
         | Unfortunately they do not support PostreSQL... But their
         | transclusion support is excellent.
        
       | RadiozRadioz wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Fabricio20 wrote:
       | 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..
        
         | movedx wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | crabmusket wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | tomxor wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | bawolff wrote:
       | > is quite lightweight and can run smoothly on a modest server
       | with:
       | 
       | >4GB RAM
       | 
       | > 2 vCPU
       | 
       | Crazy what is considered modest now a days.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-17 23:00 UTC)