How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup(themythicalengineer.com) |
How to setup self hosted wiki for your startup(themythicalengineer.com) |
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
Trivial to set up. Trivial to migrate to, and from (should you ever need to). Doesn't need a database. There are lots of plugins available and it's sooo easy to write plugins for. Even if you hate PHP.
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.
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..
1. Does it support rendering OpenAPI json/yaml?
2. Also it seems like it supports Draw.io via public URL. That's a no go. Can it support draw.io diagrams via attachments?
3. Google drive support is nice. Do you plan on supporting OneDrive as well?
Does it support the use case of publishing the wiki as a public documentation site, while allowing authenticated users to edit?
Also, Dokuwiki is nice, if a little dated on the UI side of things.
That would solve so many problems.
So I haven't stopped looking for other applications and when I tried BookStack I knew I found my solution: Loads amazingly fast, while running in the simplest environments as it's PHP.
Previously I have also used DokuWiki, which was also simple but I didn't want to write in Markdown, and especially explain it to others.
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.
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.
>4GB RAM
> 2 vCPU
Crazy what is considered modest now a days.
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.
Basically want Confluence but faster.
If you want a free markdown based public wiki use Astro's Starlight.
A cheap private wiki can be made with Obsidian.
"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.
Am I the only person left who simply has a web server? Untar Mediawiki, edit a few config variables, run an established database script, and off you go. Maybe I'm wildly out of touch, but I don't see why everything has to be a container or a monthly paid service around here.
I get it for something like an email server, where misconfiguration could lead to your server being a zombie, but I don't get it for something like a wiki.
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
We have a pretty substantial Confluence Cloud and don't see the "search doesn't work" problem. Tangent: we have people who browse, and people who search, and ne'er the twain shall meet, but that's a different problem in page structure, conventions, tags, whatever.
The only reason I would even remotely consider it is if I already had gigantic investment in Jira, and even then I'd strongly consider doing something else and writing up a small sync tool to keep task statuses updated.
Anything that requires time or money for less than 10 people.
Notion has similar problems (search sucks, performance doesn't scale), but starts costing once there's more than one person. You go from £0 to £20/mo for two people, and the chances are that at two people you're on ramen money so you don't want to be spending on... anything. Mediawiki and co require a VPS and auth/vpn/management. That's a distraction you don't need for the first 6-12 months of working at a startup. If I as a startup CTO/founding engineer spend 2 hours setting up mediawiki to spend £60 in a year on, the payback vs confluence or github wiki (which is running in seconds and is free) is when you scale to 10 people. Move to something when you have an actual need for it. By the time you're spending $64/mo on confluence users (or £100/mo on notion - sorry for currency switch but confluences pricing is only in USD for me), you're spending 10x that on payroll _management_. It's just a nothingburger.
Confluence is so bad it reminds of that meme: "I expected nothing and I am still dissapointed".
It's so bad I would be happy to use github wiki over it, even if my employer wasn't using github for version control.
2/3. Not currently but anyone could add support for such things
There are still plenty of not sane container builds that don't make it easy. If I need to checkout a git repo and mount a path into the container it's not sane. Pulling an image and starting a docker-compose should be all that's needed.
The only reason I recommended DO is it’s just simple and not too expensive. But your point is fair.
My experience with _every_ knowledge base has been that this is the solution. My current team has confluence pages pinned to slack channels which link to the other necessary pages.
There are companies that offer mediawiki as a SASS app. You can self-host if you want but you by no means have to.
I'd agree that most startups probably dont want to bother with doing their own setup as they have more important things to focus on.
[Disclaimer, im a mediawiki dev]
I’m not saying it’s 100% of startups, but unless you have a good reason not to, I think confluence is the right choice.
and 100% agreed, self-hosting is usually not a good choice for a small company, and cost is basically not an issue beyond ~10+.
Notion is an interesting one. I wouldn't personally call it a wiki, but I can kinda see why some would. but the performance and cost and and etc combined with feature-lock-in that Notion has would put it pretty far down the list for me too (though probably still well above confluence), and possibly completely rule it out (which confluence avoids).
But, my experience is that even when search is good, you need the right query. Take onboarding instructions. Do you search for "new hire", "initial setup", "setup guide", "engineering onboarding", "programmer first steps"?
Or, do you send a link in a welcome email to the right page, and have it pinned on the home page of your project?
Honestly, I think confluence would be better _without_ search.