Implementing A Distributed Wiki

In my last post, I mentioned wanting to set up a personal wiki. I thought about it more this morning and realized a standard, centralized wiki would not work as well as I had originally thought. In order to properly use a wiki, I need to have access to it offline on my laptop.

Doing a Google search for "distributed wiki" returned this post which mentioned ikiwiki. ikiwiki can use a version control system as its backend for articles. Using its support for git provides for a distributed wiki (in the same sense of "distributed" as git is a "distributed" version control system). There are even instructions on how to do this.

I have ikiwiki set up on the webserver now. I encountered some issues with the web update functionality because I do not allow setuid scripts to run on the partition with the websites. This has resulted in some non-optimal permissions but I hope to fix this in the near future. (Or, at the least, when I rebuild my webserver.)

The one thing I don't like about ikiwiki is needing to rerun the setup script every time I want to change something. However, this shouldn't be a problem once I'm done tinkering with the configuration. I suppose I'm just spoiled from using a lot of PHP web applications (like Drupal and phpBB), and perhaps interpreted languages in general, that having to run a command to "make" the application seems cumbersome.

I'm still working out the logistics of the laptop-side of this. I'm tempted to run the laptop's copy of the wiki repository on a USB flash drive so that way I can even access the files on other machines entirely. (Running git might be hard but text editing should still work.) The issues with this are finding a format that all OS X, Windows, and Linux like that is not FAT32. With the appropriate software, ext3fs may be the winner but this is another topic for another day.

Edit, 03 March 2009: After some thought, I am concerned that the title is misleading. So if you've come here looking for quick instructions on how to set up a distributed wiki:

1. Download ikiwiki.
2. Install ikiwiki.
3. Setup ikiwiki.
4. Set up a git repository with ikiwiki-makerepo. (There are directions on how to do this near the end of the "by hand" setup instructions.)
5. Configure ikiwiki to use the git repository.
6. Test ikiwiki.
7. Repeat the above for all other machines you may want to run the wiki on. Note that there may be special configuration needed on machines that may be offline, e.g. laptops.
8. Enjoy your new wiki.