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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).

Gollum Screenshot

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 traefik-forward-auth, so that in order to gain access to the Gollum UI at all, authentication must have already occurred.

Gollum Requirements

Ingredients

Already deployed:

Related:

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

Gollum Docker Swarm config

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

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version: '3'

services:
  app:
    image: dakue/gollum
    volumes:
     - /var/data/gollum:/gollum
    networks:
      - internal
      - traefik_public
    deploy:
      labels:
        # traefik common
        - traefik.enable=true
        - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public

        # traefikv1
        - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:gollum.example.com
        - traefik.port=4567     

        # traefikv2
        - "traefik.http.routers.gollum.rule=Host(`gollum.example.com`)"
        - "traefik.http.services.gollum.loadbalancer.server.port=4567"
        - "traefik.enable=true"

        # Remove if you wish to access the URL directly
        - "traefik.http.routers.wekan.middlewares=forward-auth@file"
    command: |
      --allow-uploads
      --emoji
      --user-icons gravatar

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>

Chef's notes 📓

  1. 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" ↩

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