Smeagol - locally hosted wiki

The goal of this project is to create a wiki software with these properties:

• Compatible with GitHub. This means:
  • Git is the backing store
  • Markdown is used to format pages
• Easy to run on your local computer.
• Really fast and easy to install.

Non goals include:

• Support for multiple users.

Phrased in another way, the goal of this project is to create something roughly like Gollum, but does not take half an hour to gem install on a low-powered Chromebook.

Getting started

See the smeagol.dev website for more install options.

If you use the Rust programming language, you can also install this tool using Cargo:

cargo install smeagol-wiki

Download the latest release from GitHub. Extract the smeagol-wiki executable from the compressed archive. smeagol-wiki is a command line application. It needs a directory containing the Markdown files you want to serve. You can pass a command line argument to it to specify the directory:

smeagol-wiki ~/wiki

When run without arguments, the current directory is used.

Once started, it listens on http://127.0.0.1:8000 by default.

Configuration

There are a few command line options:

• --host - takes an argument that specifies which IP address to bind to. By default this is 127.0.0.1, which means only users on your local computer can access the wiki. Set to 0.0.0.0 to let other computers on your network access it.
• --port - takes an argument that specifies which port to listen on. 8000 by default.
• --fs - instructs Smeagol to load and save using the file system. By default Smeagol uses Git to load files committed to a Git repository and saves them by committing them to the current branch.

Additionally, the following settings can be put in a smeagol.toml file in the root directory of the wiki:

• index-page - By default README. When you browse to a directory, Smeagol will display a file whose name (not including the extension) is index-page. For example, when you navigate to /page/for/bar/, Smeagol will display the file at foo/bar/README.md.
• h1-title - By default false. When false, Smeagol will use the file name as the title of the page. This title will be displayed at the top of the page and in the title bar. When this setting is true and a document starts with an h1 (written as a line that starts with # in Markdown), the text of this h1 will be used as the title of the page. It will not be rendered as a normal part of the document.

Differences from Gollum

• index-page on Gollum defaults to Home. Smeagol defaults to README to be compatible with online code hosting systems such as GitHub and Azure Devops.
• The default port is 8000 rather than 4567.
• Support for transclusion. If a line contains {{file-name.md}}, the contents of file-name.md will replace that line.

Security

Smeagol is intended to be run on your local computer to read your own private data. It is not designed to be exposed to the public internet: there is no authentication.

That said, there is one class of security problem I would be interested in hearing about: opening a maliciously designed Wiki with Smeagol either causing code execution or writing to files outside the wiki directory. Please file an issue if you encounter such a problem.

Why Rust, please tell me more about why you love Rust

Rust makes it easy to ship cross-compiled executables that run without much fuss. As for why not some other language also shares this capability (Go or C#), I just want to get more experience working with Rust.

License

Licensed under the MIT License.

Note that some elements, specifically aspects of the visual design, have been copied from Gollum.