From Notepad++ Nut and Vim Virtuoso to Wikijs

Hello Everyone,

So I have to admit it. I am guilty, convicted of being a text file maniac! 

I was one of the people who would feverishly create tons of text files notes on my desktop.

Solve an issue! “oh yes I need to write this down.. hey I will create a text file”

Then I graduated to the documents folder, and then different folders per context: Kasten_install, PCA_exam_prep, how_I_finally_got_ingress_to_work.. and so on and so on. 

Obviously at work I would use the company CRM system but at home… there were not rules and the Universe was one of chaos and endless questions  “I knew I wrote the solution to this down somewhere????”

ENTER WIKIJS!! https://js.wiki/

Wikijs is an opensource “host it yourself wiki system”. Now I would not be talking about this unless.. yes we can install it in Kubernetes!

What I liked right from the get go was the documentation interface that pretty much mirrors what wikijs looks like when you install it yourself: https://docs.requarks.io/ since, surprise surprise it is running on wikijs!

I am going to leverage helm to install so we will start by adding the repo:

helm repo add requarks https://charts.js.wiki

As always update the repos after adding:

helm repo update

I am also going to pull down the values files to carve the install to my particular needs:

helm show values requarks/wiki >values.yaml

I am installing this on my laptop which is using Rancher Desktop. The k3s kubernetes distribution that comes with it has the ingress Traefik installed by default so I am going to turn that on in the values.yaml file:

Take a look through the values.yaml file to see if there is anything else that you would want to change. One that sticks out is of course setting up tls but since this is just on my laptop I will skip that for now.

Next I will perform the installation:

helm create ns wiki 
helm install wikijs -n wiki requarks/wiki -f values.yaml

The install is done and everything is looking good

Let me check that ingress address and then push it to my browser:

K get ing -n wiki

I am going to fill it in with some baloney just for POC sake:

This app has style!

Cool login screen:

It gives you the choice either to go straight into your Admin page or create a home page:

What to do?

I decided to checkout the Admin page:

Well that is it, I have no more excuses, all relevant tid bits of valuable information will now be saved in one convenient place! Oh, and did I mention that this is leveraging persistent storage by default with the PostgreSQL database? You all know what that means!  

Before doing anything else I will setup backups in Kasten, our favourite Kubernetes backup tool!