Ikiwiki

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Revision as of 19:16, 30 April 2026 by Eleni (talk | contribs)

About

Ikiwiki is a very lightweight wiki compiler that generates static html from markdown files through a git repository.

It is a very cool project with terrible documentation, so let's compile what we know and learn in this page!

Installing on Debian

NOTE:

where $WIKI put the name of your wiki

where $USER put the name of the local user

sudo apt install ikiwiki

make sure you also have librpc-xml-perl and python-docutils

Setup [1]

You run the following command:

ikiwiki --setup /etc/ikiwiki/auto.setup

If you get this error:

/etc/ikiwiki/auto.setup: Only one Term::ReadLine::Gnu instance is allowed. at /usr/share/perl5/IkiWiki/Setup/Automator.pm line 17.

try adding PERL_RL=Perl before ikiwiki [2]

you will then get a series of prompts:

What will the wiki be named? $WIKI
What revision control system to use? git
What wiki user (or openid) will be admin? $USER
Choose a password:

You can later change these settings in /home/$USER/$WIKI.setup

ikiwiki edit flow

Variables

Two important variables in the ikiwiki universe are $srcdir, the source directory, and $destdir, the destination directory.


You make changes in $srcdir only! Ikiwiki does the rest.


by default, your $srcdir is /home/$USER/$WIKI/

and your $destdir is /home/$USER/public_html/$WIKI

Publishing your ikiwiki with nginx

heh

Ikiwiki on a subdomain

heh

Installing ikiwiki on a phone server

Claudio pls add here <3

Editing the wiki

Adding content

! always add and modify inside $srcdir !

start by creating an index page with touch index.mdwn then sudo nano index.mdwn to add content. use markdown syntax!


to add the file to the git repository for the first time, run git add index.mdwn

every time you're done make changes to your wiki, run git commit -m "your inspirational message" then git push


your last step to compile the files in the git repository in ikiwiki is to run

ikiwiki $srcdir $destdir --rebuild

for example,

ikiwiki /home/$USER/$WIKI/ /home/$USER/public_html/$WIKI --rebuild

this command rebuilds the whole wiki tree. If you just made content changes inside existing markdown files, you can write --refresh instead.

Customizing CSS

add local.css in the git folder /home/$USER/$WIKI/

that way you can fully customize your wiki!

Projects built on ikiwiki

References