code-quality

Personal Wiki

Personal wiki using gollum

Engineering Manager · Product Owner · Varicon

Aug 17, 2016·2 min read

For some time I have been trying to have my personal wiki,where I could add programming notes for my own reference. I didn’t want them to exist in blogs. I think blogs need to be more carefully thought and polished. Also I could not write any secret informations there.

My search for personal wiki led me to gollum. It is a simple wiki system built on top of Git. Setting it up is quite easy for any rubyist. Basic workflow to create new gollum wiki would be something like this:

Installation

# install gollum
$ gem install gollum
# make new directory and cd into it
$ mkdir new_wiki && cd &_
# initialise git
$ git init
# start gollum there
$ gollum .

You need to visit http://localhost:4567 to access this wiki. And you can now start adding new pages. If you want to create new pages inside folder you had to name as folder_name/file_name.

However I ran into problem while trying to install gollum gem. Here is that output:

$ gem install gollum
Fetching: charlock_holmes-0.7.3.gem (100%)
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing gollum:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
 
    current directory: /home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.3.1/lib/ruby/gems/2.3.0/gems/charlock_holmes-0.7.3/ext/charlock_holmes
/home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.3.1/bin/ruby -r ./siteconf20160817-26716-1a0rqd4.rb extconf.rb
checking for main() in -licui18n... no
checking for main() in -licui18n... no
 
 
***************************************************************************************
*********** icu required (brew install icu4c or apt-get install libicu-dev) ***********
***************************************************************************************
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary
libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more details.  You may
need configuration options.
 
Provided configuration options:
	--with-opt-dir
	--without-opt-dir
	--with-opt-include
	--without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
	--with-opt-lib
	--without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
	--with-make-prog
	--without-make-prog
	--srcdir=.
	--curdir
	--ruby=/home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.3.1/bin/$(RUBY_BASE_NAME)
	--with-icu-dir
	--without-icu-dir
	--with-icu-include
	--without-icu-include=${icu-dir}/include
	--with-icu-lib
	--without-icu-lib=${icu-dir}/lib
	--with-icui18nlib
	--without-icui18nlib
	--with-icui18nlib
	--without-icui18nlib
 
To see why this extension failed to compile, please check the mkmf.log which can be found here:
 
  /home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.3.1/lib/ruby/gems/2.3.0/extensions/x86_64-linux/2.3.0-static/charlock_holmes-0.7.3/mkmf.log
 
extconf failed, exit code 1
 
Gem files will remain installed in /home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.3.1/lib/ruby/gems/2.3.0/gems/charlock_holmes-0.7.3 for inspection.
Results logged to /home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.3.1/lib/ruby/gems/2.3.0/extensions/x86_64-linux/2.3.0-static/charlock_holmes-0.7.3/gem_make.out

The error log clearly mentioned that gem depends on icu and I need to install it before being able to install gem. Thus I installed dependencies as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install libicu-dev

Removing files

I could not find any option to remove files in web interface, I had to remove files manually if I wanted to delete from my wiki. However it wouldn’t reflect until I made a git commit after deleting files.

Adding/Updating files from web interface automatically make relevent git commit though.

Would you use gollum for personal wiki? what other solutions do you know? Don’t forget to comment below.

About the author

Prakash Poudel Sharma

Engineering Manager · Product Owner · Varicon

Engineering Manager at Varicon, leading the Onboarding squad as Product Owner. Eleven years of building software — first as a programmer, then as a founder, now sharpening the product craft from the inside of a focused team.

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