this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

+1.

And if you truly need lightweight,

Dokuwiki

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

I just left Docuwiki for Notion but i used Dokuwiki for almost 10 years and it was perfect for simple documentation.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Fossil-scm.org is very lightweight (2mb ram) and does quite a lot. See if you like it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

That's pretty neat!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Fossil looks really cool ! To bad they don't approve a container setup ! They surely have their reason.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

They don’t? They even ship a Dockerfile, the prebuilt image is just not published on a registry

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/containers.md

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wow, they really hate the idea that everyone could just spin up a Docker container with their wiki software.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Hadn't heard of it before. Looks promising, thank you.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I second DokuWiki. It's super lightweight and infinitely customizable with plugins.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I've been using silverbullet.md

Its more notes than wiki I guess so depends what you're after.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's apparently early in development, but there's an ActivityPub implementation of wikis made by one of Lemmy's dev.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Mkdocs fits your criteria imo. But if you want something more customizable, you could use the astro.build docs template

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I use gitit and it's already packaged in most Linux distros.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I use markdown files in git + mkdocs with a post-commit build and push step. You could also try lektor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Trilium. Share the nodes in the tree that you want public.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

@SexualPolytope

For a long time I’ve used https://tiddlywiki.com/ for tracking details and notes while working on projects.

#wiki

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago

For what's worth Wordpress can work as a wiki with a wiki theme like this one. Modern standards dictate that it's light... doesn't consume resources when not in use and it's easy to install and manage.