This tutorial will walk you through setting up a wiki with ikiwiki.
[[!toc ]]
[[Download]] and [[install]] ikiwiki
If you're using Debian or Ubuntu, ikiwiki is an apt-get install ikiwiki away.
If you're not, see the [[download]] and [[install]] pages.
Create your wiki
All it takes to create a fully functional wiki using ikiwiki is running
one command.
% ikiwiki -setup /etc/ikiwiki/auto.setup
Or, set up a blog with ikiwiki, run this command instead.
% ikiwiki -setup /etc/ikiwiki/auto-blog.setup
Either way, it will ask you a couple of questions.
What will the wiki be named? foo
What revision control system to use? git
What wiki user (or openid) will be admin? joey
Choose a password:
Then, wait for it to tell you an url for your new site..
Successfully set up foo:
url: http://example.com/~joey/foo
srcdir: ~/foo
destdir: ~/public_html/foo
repository: ~/foo.git
To modify settings, edit ~/foo.setup and then run:
ikiwiki -setup ~/foo.setup
Done!
Using the web interface
Now you can go to the url it told you, and edit pages in your new wiki
using the web interface.
You can log in using the wiki user and password (or the openid)
that you told it to set up earlier. That user is an admin, so you can
go to the Preferences page and click on "Wiki Setup" to further
configure the wiki.
(If the web interface doesn't seem to allow editing or login, you may
need to configure [[apache|tips/apache_cgi]] or
[[lighttpd|tips/lighttpd_cgi]].)
Checkout and edit wiki source
Part of the fun of using ikiwiki is not being limited to using the
web for editing pages, and instead using your favorite text editor and
[[Revision_Control_System|rcs]].
To do this, you need to check out a copy of the source to your wiki.
You should avoid making changes directly to the srcdir, as that
checkout is reserved for use by ikiwiki itself.
Depending on which [[Revision_Control_System|rcs]] you chose to use,
you can run one of these commands to check out your own copy of your wiki's
source. (Remember to replace "foo" with the real directory name.)
git clone foo.git foo.src
svn checkout file://`pwd`/foo.svn/trunk foo.src
bzr clone foo foo.src
hg clone foo foo.src
# TODO monotone, tla
Now to edit pages by hand, go into the directory you checked out (ie,
"foo.src"), and fire up your text editor to edit index.mdwn or whatever
other page you want to edit. If you chose to set up a blog, there is even a
sample first post in posts/first_post.mdwn that you can edit.
Once you've edited a page, use your revision control system to commit
the changes. For distributed revision control systems, don't forget to push
your commit.
Once the commit reaches the repository, ikiwiki will notice it, and
automatically update the wiki with your changes.
Customizing the wiki
There are lots of things you can configure to customize your wiki.
These range from changing the wiki's name, to enabling [[plugins]],
to banning users and locking pages.
If you log in as the admin user you configured earlier, and go to
your Preferences page, you can click on "Wiki Setup" to customize many
wiki settings and plugins.
Some settings cannot be configured on the web, for security reasons or
because misconfiguring them could break the wiki. To change these settings,
you can manually edit the setup file, which is named something like
"foo.setup". The file lists all available configuration settings
and gives a brief description of each.
After making changes to this file, you need to tell ikiwiki to use it:
% ikiwiki -setup foo.setup
Customizing file locations
As a wiki compiler, ikiwiki builds a wiki from files in a source directory,
and outputs the files to a destination directory. The source directory is
a working copy checked out from the version control system repository.
When you used auto.setup, ikiwiki put the source directory, destination
directory, and repository in your home directory, and told you the location
of each. Those locations were chosen to work without customization, but you
might want to move them to different directories. There are three steps to
this process.
-
Move the destination directory and repository around.
% mv public_html/foo /srv/web/foo.com
% mv foo.git /srv/git/foo.git
-
Create a new source directory checkout. If you moved the repository
to a new location, checkouts pointing at the old location won't work,
and the easiest way to deal with this is to delete them and re-checkout
from the new repository location.
% rm -rf foo
% git clone /src/git/foo.git
-
Edit the setup file. Modify the settings for srcdir, destdir,
url, cgiurl, cgi_wrapper, git_wrapper, etc to reflect where
you moved things. Remember to run ikiwiki -setup after editing the
setup file.
Enjoy your new wiki!
Add yourself to [[IkiWikiUsers]]. And check out
the [[tips]] to find out how to get more out of ikiwiki.
