What is the crowd's opinion of ikiwiki?

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I am a big fan of ikiwiki for sysadmin docs.

• Data is stored as plain files on the filesystem, using git or your favorite vcs for versioning.
• Default markup format is markdown (just like what you use for reddit, github, stackexchange, etc).
• Since it is vcs-based you can pull a copy of the docs and easily keep it sync on a usb-stick or portable drive.
  • ikiwiki is very use to in an emergency. It is all human readable plain files.
  • your big wiki based on mysql+apache+php means you have to have a running database server, web server, and network to get to your docs. How do you recover from a disaster when your DR plan is documented on the network that has failed.
  • a cloud based wiki, also requires that you have working network access.

I like ikiwiki, enough to help run a hosting service for it, together with its author. Ikiwiki is written in Perl, not Python, but I don't care. It works well, and is pretty comprehensive, and by now, after many years of development, almost always has everything I want from it, even before I realize I do. (But I'm biased.)

• [original post](/r/programming/comments/60muf/ikiwiki_a_wiki_with_documentation_and_bug/)
• poster: [akkartik](/u/akkartik)
• sub: [/r/programming](/r/programming)
• score: 43
• comments: 16

Note: I make every effort to programatically figure out if links originally posted to Reddit are still good, but it's difficult.

If the original URL doesn't work, or has been replaced with something else, please help out by searching the Wayback Machine for the URL and posting a contemporary link if you find one. There's also a Chrome Extension which makes this process easy.

It's Perl (ugh) and takes a bit of effort to install (unless you shortcut via docker image or similar) and more effort to set up (bad default theme etc.) but I use Ikiwiki, partly because I am (now) familiar with it, but also because I know I can get out of it if I want to, and it's very powerful.

I started trying to make a ikiwiki-in-a-box docker image a while ago.

I was reading the Debain Blog on Tuesday and saw they use ikiWiki for something. I gave it a try. It installs a public_html folder in your Linux home directory. You need to enable cgi on your local apache web server, in order to edit the wiki. It uses Git and other version control software. I just saw this post today, Wednesday. ikiWiki

Have you tried using ikiwiki? It is a wiki software that converts text in markdown format to html. It can also be used to create blog (same method: create text file in mardown format).

It uses version control software (svn/git/etc) for storing the files and I think that is how it gets the creation time of the file (i.e by reading the metadata from the versioning software).