GIT based wiki with Gollum

We all need information. There are some many things we need to remember on a standard DevOps project. There are multiple things that we can forget pretty easy. I know so many teams that really only on Slack to track information and that is a big problem. IMHO no one wants complex and heavyweight tools to track information. Developers want simple, easy and pain-free tools like wikis. The problem with most of the wiki tools is that they are heavy and complex to manage. IMHO for small and medium projects we a better solution. I love Git and I love GitHub. GIT has some many nice properties like Easy to audit, easy to merge, we never lot updates, we know everything that happened, we can get back in time pretty easy. For those reasons I really like GIT based Wikies like Gollum. Gollum is built with Ruby and has a nice and clean UI. Using Gollum UI - Gollum translates all the changes into git commands and make commits for us. When we run Gollum, it takes care of everything - the only thing we need to do is to run a git PUSH in order to send changes to a remote repo.

GIT Based Wiki

Gollum requires Ruby and Ruby's Gems / Bundler installed. I advise you to install ruby and ruby/gems via RVM.

In summary, this is the main benefits of this approach:

  • Easy for Engineers to use
  • Simple editing (Markdown support) - Visualize in Github any git-based tool
  • Auditing - thanks to Git
  • Run local with simple command/script
  • Easy Merge support - thanks to GIt 




Running Gollum



Gollum Script



In order, o use the script you need to run:

chmod +x gollum.sh

Them you do(this just need to be done 1 time):

sudo ./gollum.sh install

Create your git repo with git init or git clone an existing one, open(cd on the console) this git repo(the git repo that will be the source of the wiki). Don't run Gollum on the same folder as Gollum(git repo itself). The Gollum script will assume that where Gollum script is running is the place where is the git repo(wiki git repo).

Them run:

sudo ./gollum.sh run

If you want you can go to the browser on http://localhost:4567 or just run:

./gollum.sh open

After using the UI you just need to run:

sudo ./gollum.sh save

Gollum is simple and easy to run locally or if you prefer you can install on a server, there are auth configurations you might need to enable.

cheers,
Diego Pacheco


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