tildewiki

TildeWiki

TildeWiki is a memory-caching static site server. The possible uses of TildeWiki range from blogs to wikis, and more. Let me know if you adapt it to a new use-case, I'm always interested!

Originally designed around the needs of the tildeverse.¹

[Features] | [Installation] | [Benchmarks] | [Notes]

v0.6.3

Version 0.6.3 Changes:

• User/Requester IP and User-Agent logged
• More concurrency protection
• Fixed malformed errors in logs
• Bugfixes! Yay!

Development Branch

Contains the changes going into the next version

Currently powering the tilde.institute wiki:

• https://wiki.tilde.institute
• gtmetrix report

Features

• Speed is a priority
• Mobile-friendly pages
• Markdown!²
• Compressed responses (gzip)
• Uses kognise/water.css dark theme by default (and includes as an example, a simple but nice local CSS file)³
• YAML configuration
• Automatically reloads config file when a change is detected.
• Generates list of pages, then places at an anchor comment in the index page
• Caches pages to memory and only re-renders when the file changes
• Very configurable. For example:
  • URL path for viewing pages
  • Directory for page data
  • File to use for index page
  • Logging output (file, stdout, null) and file location
• Runs as a multithreaded service, rather than via CGI
• Easily use Caddy or Nginx to proxy requests to it. This allows you to use your existing SSL certificates (or, in the case of Caddy, painlessly generate new ones).

Installation

The installation script uses bash, and the startup script uses daemonize. Both should be available in any Linux distribution's package repositories. However, they are not required to use TildeWiki.

Using the scripts

First, clone the repository or download and untar a release archive, then enter the directory.

$ git clone git://github.com/gbmor/tildewiki.git && cd tildewiki

$ curl -L https://github.com/gbmor/tildewiki/archive/v0.6.3.tar.gz | tar xzvf - && cd tildewiki-v0.6.3

If you used git, the master branch will be the most recent release. Development work stays in the dev branch, so there's no need to look for a tag.

Execute setup.sh as root, with the install argument:

$ sudo ./setup.sh install

Once you receive the confirmation message, and no errors have appeared, you may run the startup script as root to test the installation:

$ sudo tildewiki

TildeWiki will drop privileges to the tildewiki user, which was created by the script.

I'm going to add a systemd service file soon. For now, it'll need to be started like this.

Building manually

If you prefer, you can install it this way. Clone the repository or download a source archive like above, and enter the directory. Once in the directory, you'll need to build the binary.

$ go build

It won't take long. Also, it doesn't need to live in your GOPATH as it's been set up to use Go Modules.

After it finishes, you can leave the binary where it is or move it somewhere else. Remember to move the pages and assets directories with it, along with tildewiki.yaml.

Setting up TildeWIki

Begin by combing through tildewiki.yaml (if you used the scripts, it's in /usr/local/tildewiki) and changing the options to something appropriate to your site. Afterwards, place your markdown-formatted pages into the directory specified by PageDir in the config and place your markdown-formatted index file, containing the anchor comment <!--pagelist-->, into the AssetsDir. Feel free to change the favicon and CSS to your liking.

Once that's all done, either run /usr/local/bin/tildewiki (if you've used the scripts) or run the binary manually.

Serving TildeWiki

Unless you plan on serving directly from :8080 (which is fine!), or whichever port you chose in tildewiki.yaml, I recommend proxying requests to TildeWiki so it can be served from a subdomain, for example. There are several options for this, namely Caddy and nginx. The best option is for you to use Caddy: it integrates TLS certificate renewal and has a very easy configuration syntax.

If you're going to use Nginx, here's an example server block for you to start with. Note: this example uses TLS and http2. LetsEncrypt is awesome, and free. Their certbot tool is really easy to use.

server {
    server_name wiki.example.com;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
    listen 0.0.0.0:443 ssl http2;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/wiki.example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/wiki.example.com/privkey.pem;
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;
    location / {
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
    }
}
server {
    if ($host = wiki.example.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    }
    listen 80;
    server_name wiki.example.com;
    return 404;
}

Benchmarks

• bombardier

$ bombardier -c 100 -n 200000 http://localhost:8080

Bombarding http://localhost:8080 with 200000 request(s) using 100 connection(s)
 200000 / 200000 [===========================================] 100.00% 7512/s 26s
Done!
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec      7548.57     663.04   10453.06
  Latency       13.24ms     2.38ms    49.32ms
  HTTP codes:
    1xx - 0, 2xx - 200000, 3xx - 0, 4xx - 0, 5xx - 0
    others - 0
  Throughput:     8.55MB/s

• baton

$ baton -u http://localhost:8080 -c 100 -r 200000

...

=========================== Results ========================================

Total requests:                                200000
Time taken to complete requests:        27.270626274s
Requests per second:                             7334
Max response time (ms):                            52
Min response time (ms):                             0
Avg response time (ms):                         13.11

========= Percentage of responses by status code ==========================

Number of connection errors:                        0
Number of 1xx responses:                            0
Number of 2xx responses:                       200000
Number of 3xx responses:                            0
Number of 4xx responses:                            0
Number of 5xx responses:                            0

========= Percentage of responses received within a certain time (ms)======

         9% : 5 ms
        13% : 10 ms
        79% : 15 ms
        95% : 20 ms
        98% : 25 ms
        99% : 30 ms
        99% : 35 ms
        99% : 40 ms
        99% : 45 ms
       100% : 52 ms

===========================================================================

Notes

• Builds with Go 1.11 and Go 1.12.
• Tested on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04LTS, Debian 9, 10, and Sid) and OpenBSD 6.4

1. For tildeverse projects, we tend to use a PR workflow for collaboration. For example, wiki pages are submitted to the repo via pull request. I'm currently evaluating other options for page creation and editing.

2. Uses a patched copy of russross/blackfriday (gopkg) as the markdown parser. The patch allows injection of various <meta.../> tags into the document header during the markdown->html translation.

   • The patched v2 repository lives at: gbmor-forks/blackfriday.v2-patched

   • The patched master repo lives at: gbmor-forks/blackfriday.

   • The PR can be found here: allow writing of user-specified <meta.../>...

3. The local CSS provided is the "58 bytes of CSS" from https://jrl.ninja/etc/1/