I currently run a personal wiki for some notes, recipes, and stuff. It’s set up using Wiki.js as the server. I’m the only regular user, and I feel like it’s a bit of an overkill.
Does someone have any suggestions for a more lightweight wiki server? I tried DokuWiki and mostly like it. But the UI is very old and dare I say, ugly. I love the UI of Wiki.js btw.
My main criteria is that it should be lightweight. I don’t need fancy editing features. Happy to work with raw html or markdown files.
I need some kind of permission management to hide some private wikis from the public, but otherwise I don’t really care.
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I have been using Bookstack, I like it though it is missing a few features I would love:
- you cannot insert a video in it
- there is no possibility to comment on a particular text
- the permissions management is only done with roles. That’s fine generally but I wanted to be able to share a specific page with a specific user, and for that I had to basically create a dedicated role for this use.
Seconding Bookstack. I’ve embedded videos in it and I don’t recall anything special to do it. I also think there’s a way to comment on specific pages…mostly because I remember disabling that functionality.
Agreed on the roles and permissions aspect though. It’s pretty standard to do that for bigger deployments, but it may be a bit overkill for a single user instance.
Mediawiki
I just left Docuwiki for Notion but i used Dokuwiki for almost 10 years and it was perfect for simple documentation.
Fossil-scm.org is very lightweight (2mb ram) and does quite a lot. See if you like it.
That’s pretty neat!
Fossil looks really cool ! To bad they don’t approve a container setup ! They surely have their reason.
They don’t? They even ship a Dockerfile, the prebuilt image is just not published on a registry
Wow, they really hate the idea that everyone could just spin up a Docker container with their wiki software.
Eh, they just don’t pre-build and publish the image themselves. Why assume malice? 🤷♂️
Btw, Fossil isn’t really a wiki software but a full on source control system a la git, with its own front end, that includes a wiki. It’s developed and used by the SQLite developers. It’s a single executable, so it’s pretty easy to run anywhere already, I assume they may just provide the Dockerfile for convenience…
Given this context it seems much more reasonable having such a complex and long instructions page on how to run it in Docker. This seems to be something you don’t just try and run simply for checking it out.
I looked at the instructions it under the premise of “lightweight wiki server” and did not check in detail what this specific software is.
Hadn’t heard of it before. Looks promising, thank you.
Dokuwiki doesn’t have to look old, it is only the default theme that does. Just install a nicer theme and the Prosemirror addon and it looks and functions like any other modern wiki.
I’ve been using silverbullet.md
Its more notes than wiki I guess so depends what you’re after.
I needed something dead-simple to keep homelab documentation. If it’s not simple, I probably wouldn’t keep up with changes. I landed on An Otter Wiki https://github.com/redimp/otterwiki
Using dokuwiki, just cut the cheese for me.
Its “old” because it uses php, but its quite solid and doesn’t need a database, so all plus to me.
There are cool and modern looking themes too.
I second DokuWiki. It’s super lightweight and infinitely customizable with plugins.
It’s apparently early in development, but there’s an ActivityPub implementation of wikis made by one of Lemmy’s dev.
I use https://mycorrhiza.wiki/ it is not very fancy but it is a single executable file and stores pages in a git repository, so no database is needed and doing the export is as simple as reading some files.
Mkdocs fits your criteria imo. But if you want something more customizable, you could use the astro.build docs template
It doesn’t cover permissions unless you are willing to setup http auth on your webserver but I really enjoy mdbooks. I looks clean and still is just markdown.
I use tiddlywiki for my single-user wiki. The setup is dead simple, one html file on your computer you open directly. There is also a nodejs server implementation, which I use.
I use gitit and it’s already packaged in most Linux distros.
I use markdown files in git + mkdocs with a post-commit build and push step. You could also try lektor.
You said you liked the look of wiki.js but didn’t say what you didn’t like (unless I was missed it). Why not just use wiki.js? If you want permissions you’ll likely end up with other features like editing too.
I currently use Wiki.js but it’s a bit too much. The image size is around 500MB. I don’t see why I need such a huge program for hosting essentially text files and some images.
From the comments, DokuWiki with a modern theme, Fossil-SCM, and MkDocs seem nice. I’ll probably try some of these during the weekend.
