jmtd → log → Opinionated IkiWiki

For various personal projects and things, past and present (including my personal site) I use IkiWiki, which (by modern standards) is a bit of a pain to set up and maintain. For that reason I find it hard to recommend to people. It would be nice to fire up a snapshot of an existing IkiWiki instance to test what the outcome of some changes might be. That's cumbersome enough at the moment that I haven't bothered to do it more than once. Separately, some months ago I did a routine upgrade of Debian for the web server running this site, and my IkiWiki installation broke for the first time in ten years. I've never had issues like this before.

For all of these reasons I've just dusted off an old experiment of mine now renamed Opinionated IkiWiki. It's IkiWiki in a container, configured to be usable out-of-the-box, with some opinionated configuration decisions made for you. The intention is you should be able to fire up this container and immediately have a useful IkiWiki instance to work from. It should hopefully be easier to clone an existing wiki— content, configuration and all—for experimentation.

You can check out the source at GitHub, and grab container images from quay.io. Or fire one up immediately at http://127.0.0.1:8080 with something like

podman run --rm -ti -p 8080:8080 \
quay.io/jdowland/opinionated-ikiwiki:latest

This was a good excuse to learn about multi-stage container builds and explore quay.io.

Feedback gratefully received: As GitHub issues, comments here, or mail.