Realms¶

Realms is a git-based wiki (like Gollum, but with basic authentication and registration)

Realms Screenshot

Features include:

Built with Bootstrap 3.
Markdown (w/ HTML Support).
Syntax highlighting (Ace Editor).
Live preview.
Collaboration (TogetherJS / Firepad).
Drafts saved to local storage.
Handlebars for templates and logic.

Project likely abandoned

In my limited trial, Realms seems less useful than Gollum for my particular use-case (i.e., you're limited to markdown syntax only), but other users may enjoy the basic user authentication and registration features, which Gollum lacks.

Also of note is that the docker image is 1.17GB in size, and the handful of commits to the source GitHub repo in the past year has listed TravisCI build failures. This has many of the hallmarks of an abandoned project, to my mind.

Ingredients¶

Ingredients

Already deployed:

Docker swarm cluster with persistent shared storage
Traefik configured per design
DNS entry for the hostname you intend to use (or a wildcard), pointed to your keepalived IP

Traefik Forward Auth to secure your Traefik-exposed services with an additional layer of authentication

Preparation¶

Setup data locations¶

Since we'll start with a basic Realms install, let's just create a single directory to hold the realms (SQLite) data:

mkdir /var/data/realms/

Create realms.env, and populate with the following variables (if you intend to use an oauth_proxy to double-secure your installation, which I recommend)

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

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version: "3"

services:
  realms:
    image: realms/realms-wiki:latest
    env_file: /var/data/config/realms/realms.env
    volumes:
      - /var/data/realms:/home/wiki/data
    networks:
      - internal

  realms_proxy:
    image: funkypenguin/oauth2_proxy:latest
    env_file : /var/data/config/realms/realms.env
    networks:
      - internal
      - traefik_public
    deploy:
      labels:
        - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:realms.funkypenguin.co.nz
        - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public
        - traefik.port=4180
    volumes:
      - /var/data/config/realms/authenticated-emails.txt:/authenticated-emails.txt
    command: |
      -cookie-secure=false
      -upstream=http://realms:5000
      -redirect-url=https://realms.funkypenguin.co.nz
      -http-address=http://0.0.0.0:4180
      -email-domain=funkypenguin.co.nz
      -provider=github
      -authenticated-emails-file=/authenticated-emails.txt

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true
  internal:
    driver: overlay
    ipam:
      config:
        - subnet: 172.16.35.0/24

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 Realms stack¶

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

Log into your new instance at https://YOUR-FQDN, authenticate against oauth_proxy, and you're immediately presented with Realms wiki, waiting for a fresh edit ;)

Chef's notes 📓¶

If you wanted to expose the Realms UI directly, you could remove the oauth2_proxy from the design, and move the traefik_public-related labels directly to the realms container. You'd also need to add the traefik_public network to the realms container. ↩
The inclusion of Realms was due to the efforts of @gkoerk in our Discord server. Thanks gkoerk! ↩

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Your comments? 💬¶

Last update: January 29, 2021