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Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

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Re: Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

#31

Post by bombela »

austinjp wrote: post #22
mojombo wrote: post #20

Fun to see this on HN! I originally created Gollum to power GitHub's wiki system and wanted to see if we could use Git to make our wikis more powerful AND more open. I thought it would be cool if you could just clone your GitHub wiki and modify it locally or export it to some other system if you needed, or have it all locally for an airplane trip without wifi. Another interesting thing is that I used my Readme Driven…

I never knew that my default approach is called readme-driven development :)

I guess building from specifications is so rare in software, we forgot how it's called.

Re: Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

#32

Post by dcchambers »

I have a strange obsession with git-powered wikis. I've spent time playing around with most of the popular ones and I think it's basically the perfect documentation format. However they all have their quirks and each one seems to be missing some major feature I want and it takes an unreal amount of self-control for me to not just throw my hands up and create my own, adding yet another one to the mix.

Re: Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

#33

Post by xrd »

mojombo wrote: post #20

Fun to see this on HN! I originally created Gollum to power GitHub's wiki system and wanted to see if we could use Git to make our wikis more powerful AND more open. I thought it would be cool if you could just clone your GitHub wiki and modify it locally or export it to some other system if you needed, or have it all locally for an airplane trip without wifi. Another interesting thing is that I used my Readme Driven…

I had forgotten you wrote both Jekyll *and* Gollum.

I'm writing the next generation of Jekyll, called Svekyll, which is Jekyll plus Svelte: "the radical simplicity of Jekyll + the futuristic power of Svelte"

https://svekyll.com

I know it has been hard for you to get in on the ground floor of things, but this is your chance if you want to invest. I'm building a publishing company with Svekyll as the starting point, but with a few extra twists coming soon. Could we jump on a call and I'll share the roadmap?

Re: Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

#34

Post by xrd »

I wrote a book for O'Reilly about GitHub and their API and for some reason no one noticed that we added a chapter on Gollum (there isn't an API to access Gollum on github). It was the weakest one of the chapters, IMHO, but, you know, deadlines. O'Reilly was gracious enough to release it under CC, so you can read that chapter (and the whole book actually) here:

https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/chapter-03-goll...

There is a section on using Rugged, the ruby git library and how you can use that with Gollum.

https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/chapter-03-goll...

While writing this book, I found it really fascinating to learn about how git works by trying to manage a Gollum wiki. For example, if you add an image to multiple places in a repository, it only needs to store it once because git can tell it is already in there.

https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/chapter-03-goll...

Re: Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

#35

Post by tga »

sneak wrote: post #6
ketzo wrote: post #2

I like the look of this a lot, particularly the support for running-from-local. I think git is such an ideal backend for something like a wiki, where multiple contributors and version history are both so important. Tangent: how do HN folks generally do technical wikis -- or really, just keep track of the technical details of your software -- in large software development organizations? My org uses Confluence for some…

Gitea supports web-based wikis that are git repos on the backend. It also has a good auth system and supports U2F (or SSO).

Unless that has changed recently, gitea doesn’t provide any way to search a wiki (!), making it quite useless for documentation.

Re: Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

#36

Post by pmontra »

ketzo wrote: post #2

I like the look of this a lot, particularly the support for running-from-local. I think git is such an ideal backend for something like a wiki, where multiple contributors and version history are both so important. Tangent: how do HN folks generally do technical wikis -- or really, just keep track of the technical details of your software -- in large software development organizations? My org uses Confluence for some…

I like to write docs with Jekyll in the same repository of the code, not in separate repository as in GitHub. In this way I can document the changes in a feature branch and leave unchanged the docs in the release branch. Then the changes get merged when we release the feature.

A customer of mine writes documentation in Google Sites (horrible UX and not for for this task, they eventually realized it) and my pages (Bitbucket) are linked from the table of contents (release branch). To read the documentation for a new feature one must know the name of the feature branch.

Re: Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

#38

Post by jdsalaro »

mojombo wrote: post #20

Fun to see this on HN! I originally created Gollum to power GitHub's wiki system and wanted to see if we could use Git to make our wikis more powerful AND more open. I thought it would be cool if you could just clone your GitHub wiki and modify it locally or export it to some other system if you needed, or have it all locally for an airplane trip without wifi. Another interesting thing is that I used my Readme Driven…

I skimmed the README and didn't find a way for Gollum to export to static HTML files only for viewing purposes, say hosting on GitHub/GitLab pages.

I've been looking for a similarly simplistic git-based wiki which works much like Jekyll/Pelican/Hugo.

Re: Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend

#40

Post by Matrixik »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #9
ketzo wrote: post #2

I like the look of this a lot, particularly the support for running-from-local. I think git is such an ideal backend for something like a wiki, where multiple contributors and version history are both so important. Tangent: how do HN folks generally do technical wikis -- or really, just keep track of the technical details of your software -- in large software development organizations? My org uses Confluence for some…

Notion.

I would love to have something like Notion but using git for all data storage and edit history.

There is https://stackedit.io/ offering it but I stopped using it because of bugs when trying to edit on mobile. And it basically abandoned for the last 2 years https://github.com/benweet/stackedit (only some deps updates, nothing more).

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