Gollum

Gollum is a simple wiki system built on top of Git. A Gollum Wiki is simply a git repository (either bare or regular) of a specific nature:

A Gollum repository's contents are human-editable, unless the repository is bare.
Pages are unique text files which may be organized into directories any way you choose.
Other content can also be included, for example images, PDFs and headers/footers for your pages.

Gollum pages:

May be written in a variety of markups.
Can be edited with your favourite system editor or IDE (changes will be visible after committing) or with the built-in web interface.
Can be displayed in all versions (commits).

As you'll note in the (real world) screenshot above, my requirements for a personal wiki are:

Portable across my devices
Supports images
Full-text search
Supports inter-note links
Revision control

Gollum meets all these requirements, and as an added bonus, is extremely fast and lightweight.

!!! note Since Gollum itself offers no user authentication, this design secures gollum behind an oauth2 proxy, so that in order to gain access to the Gollum UI at all, oauth2 authentication (to GitHub, GitLab, Google, etc) must have already occurred.

Ingredients

Docker swarm cluster with persistent shared storage
Traefik configured per design

Preparation

Setup data locations

We'll need an empty git repository in /var/data/gollum for our data:

mkdir /var/data/gollum
cd /var/data/gollum
git init

Prepare environment

Choose an oauth provider, and obtain a client ID and secret
Create gollum.env, and populate with the following variables (you can make the cookie secret whatever you like)

OAUTH2_PROXY_CLIENT_ID=
OAUTH2_PROXY_CLIENT_SECRET=
OAUTH2_PROXY_COOKIE_SECRET=

Setup Docker Swarm

Create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like this:

!!! tip I share (with my patreon patrons) a private "premix" git repository, which includes necessary docker-compose and env files for all published recipes. This means that patrons can launch any recipe with just a git pull and a docker stack deploy 👍

version: '3'

services:
  app:
    image: dakue/gollum
    volumes:
     - /var/data/gollum:/gollum
    networks:
    - internal
    command: |
      --allow-uploads
      --emoji
      --user-icons gravatar

  proxy:
    image: zappi/oauth2_proxy
    env_file : /var/data/config/gollum/gollum.env
    networks:
      - internal
      - traefik_public
    deploy:
      labels:
        - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:gollum.example.com
        - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public
        - traefik.port=4180
    volumes:
      - /var/data/config/gollum/authenticated-emails.txt:/authenticated-emails.txt
    command: |
      -cookie-secure=false
      -upstream=http://app:4567
      -redirect-url=https://gollum.example.com
      -http-address=http://0.0.0.0:4180
      -email-domain=example.com
      -provider=github
      -authenticated-emails-file=/authenticated-emails.txt

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true
  internal:
    driver: overlay
    ipam:
      config:
        - subnet: 172.16.9.0/24

!!! note Setup unique static subnets for every stack you deploy. This avoids IP/gateway conflicts which can otherwise occur when you're creating/removing stacks a lot. See my list here.

Serving

Launch Gollum stack

Launch the Gollum stack by running docker stack deploy gollum -c <path-to-docker-compose.yml>

Authenticate against your OAuth provider, and then start editing your wiki!

Chef's Notes

In the current implementation, Gollum is a "single user" tool only. The contents of the wiki are saved as markdown files under /var/data/gollum, and all the git commits are currently "Anonymous"

Tip your waiter (donate) 👏

Did you receive excellent service? Want to make your waiter happy? (..and support development of current and future recipes!) See the support page for (free or paid) ways to say thank you! 👏

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