doc/tips/nearlyfreespeech.mdwn



NearlyFreeSpeech.net is a shared hosting
provider with very cheap pay as you go pricing. Here's how to install ikiwiki
there if you don't have a dedicated server.

Get an account.
Create a site using their web interface. Mine is named ikiwiki-test and I
used their DNS instead of getting my own, resulting in
http://ikiwiki-test.nfshost.com/
Fund it. (Or don't. They gave me 2 cents free funding for signing up, which
is enough to pay for 10 megabytes of hosting, or about a thousand typical
page views at their current rates.)
ssh into their server using the ssh hostname and username displayed on
the site's information page. For me this was
ssh joeyh_ikiwiki-test@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net
Set up .profile to use your home directory.
echo "PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" > $HOME/.profile
. $HOME/.profile
You'll be in the htdocs directory by default, where public web pages are
put, so before installing ikiwiki, cd $HOME
Use wget to [[download]] the ikiwiki tarball.
Unpack ikiwiki.
tar zxvf ikiwiki*.tar.gz
Use CPAN to install the perl modules it uses into your home directory:
PERL5LIB=ikiwiki:ikiwiki/cpan:. PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 perl -MCPAN -e 'CPAN::Shell->install("Bundle::IkiWiki")'
PERL5LIB=ikiwiki:ikiwiki/cpan:. PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 perl -MCPAN -e 'CPAN::Shell->force(install => "Bundle::IkiWiki::Extras")'
(This will take a while. As long as the first command succeeds, ikiwiki will be
usable. The second command adds extra modules that some plugins use, and
installation of some of them might fail.)
Now build and install ikiwiki into your home directory.
cd ikiwiki
export MAKE=gmake
perl Makefile.PL INSTALL_BASE=$HOME PREFIX=
$MAKE
$MAKE install
With ikiwiki installed, you can follow the regular [[setup]] tutorial for
settng up your wiki. Make sure to set destdir to /home/htdocs/ so that
the wiki is published on the web site. I recommend using git for revision
control; you can then clone your wiki's git repository as an offsite backup.
Here is an example of how I set up a wiki:
mkdir ~/wiki
cd ~/wiki
cp ~/ikiwiki/doc/ikiwiki.setup .
cp -r ~/ikiwiki/doc/examples/blog/* .
nano ikiwiki.setup
Set destdir to /home/htdocs
Set srcdir to /home/private/wiki
Set url to http://yoursite.nfshost.com/ , set cgiurl likewise
Uncomment the rcs => "git" line, and the cgi and git
post-update wrapper blocks.
Set the cgi wrapper path to /home/htdocs/ikiwiki.cgi
Set the git wrapper path to /home/private/wiki.git/hooks/post-update
Configure the rest to your liking and save the file.
ikiwiki-makerepo git . ../wiki.git
ikiwiki -setup ikiwiki.setup
Finally, you can save a lot of disk space by cleaning up the ikiwiki
tarball and .cpan directory.
rm -rf ~/ikiwiki*.tar.gz ~/.cpan

Have fun and do good things. --[[Joey]]