Tutorial: How to setup a wiki in your PC

A wiki is an editable web site, where any number of pages can be added and the text of those pages edited right inside your web browser. Wiki’s are perfect for a team of multiple people collaboratively editing information (Wikipedia is the quintessential example of this) but a wiki can also be useful to an individual: as a personal, searchable, versioned, digital notebook.

Imagine storing and editing your to-do lists, bookmarks, snippets of text, project notes, reference material, images from the web or anything you wanted on your home computer from anywhere just using a web browser - no disks, thumb drives, text editors, or file transfers required. This is possible with a personal wiki.

If you’ve got a web hosting plan you can install any number of free wiki packages on your server. If not, it’s easy to install a personal wiki on your home computer to read and write to from any web browser. In this tutorial, we’ll set up a wiki on your home computer so you’ll always have access to a searchable, editable personal notebook.

Notes and disclaimers: Like the previous home server features, keep in mind that running a server and opening a port on your home computer is a risky undertaking. Make sure your PC has all the latest security updates and has been thoroughly scanned for viruses and spyware before we begin.

What you’ll need:

1. A Windows PC
2. A zip utility program (the free 7-Zip will do fine)
3. An always-on broadband Internet connection

We’re going to use a wiki package called Instiki, which is a perfect beginner’s wiki. Instiki is easy to install and easy to use, and it is written in a language called Ruby.

Let’s get started.

Step 1. Install Ruby.

Download Ruby from here. Click on the latest stable release .exe file, which at time of writing is ruby182-15.exe. Run the installer, accept the license agreement and all the default settings, including installing ruby in the C:\ruby\ folder.

Step 2. Install Instiki.

Download Instiki from here, using the .zip package, and unzip using 7-Zip or any zip utility to a folder on your hard drive. Move and rename the folder to C:\instiki.

Step 3. Run Instiki.

From the Start menu, choose Run, and type cmd to open a Windows command line. Type:

cd \instiki\

To change into the Instiki directory. Then type:

ruby instiki

To start the Instiki server. This is what your output should look like:

C:\instiki>ruby instiki
=> Starting Instiki on http://0.0.0.0:2500
=> Data files are stored in C:/instiki/storage/2500
[2005-09-16 12:45:20] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2005-09-16 12:45:20] INFO  ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [i386-mswin32]
[2005-09-16 12:45:20] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=4008 port=2500

Now, leave that window open and switch to your web browser, and go to http://localhost:2500/ to begin Instiki setup. Give your new wiki a name and a password.

After you click on the Setup button, you will be asked to enter text into your homepage. Here’s where things get fun. On the right you’ll see a quick guide to Instiki’s wiki syntax, that is, the ways you can bold and italicize your page text, add external links and reference new pages. Instiki uses ‘CamelCase’ to identify page names. So if you type MyToDoList, Instiki will automatically make that a reference to a new page, because it’s several words squashed together mixed case.

Woohoo! You’re a wiki master!

Step 4. Password your Instiki web.

If you’re going to be accessing your personal wiki from anywhere, that means anyone else will be able to edit it too - but we don’t want that. Set a password on your Instiki wiki to make it editable and readable by no one but you. Click on the “Edit Web” link inside Instiki. There, set a password for your web so only you and whoever has the password can edit it.

Step 5. Access your personal wiki from anywhere.

If your computer is not behind a router or firewall, you can now read and write to your personal wiki from any Internet-connected computer by typing your home computer’s IP address or domain name plus :2500 into a web browser’s address bar, like
http://123.456.789.0:2500
or
http://mycomputer.homeip.net:2500

That extra 2500 addresses Instiki, which runs on port 2500, Ruby’s default port. This works well because if you followed my previous Lifehacker feature on setting up your home web server, you may have Apache web server listening on port 80. They’re different, unconflicting ports so both can run simultaneously, but to reach your Instiki wiki you must add the :2500 at the end of your computer’s address.

Some more Instiki tips:

• Get your Instiki wiki to start up whenever your computer’s on with a simple batch script. Save the following into a file named startwiki.bat:

  cd \instikiruby instiki
  

  Create a Windows shortcut to startwiki.bat and place it into your C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\ folder. This will run Instiki when your computer starts up automatically.
• Export a read-only HTML version of your web using Instiki for backup or reference on another server.
• Create pages liberally, say one for each project or set of bookmarks, and use Instiki’s search feature to find things you’ve written about before.
• Use the “Print” view to take a hardcopy of any Instiki page with you on the go.

Most of all, have fun with your new wiki!

— A.P.P. Ganesh, BotHack Editor

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mac users, you haven’t been left out in the cold. Setting up Instiki on a Mac is a lot less complicated. Use the Mac OS X binary link to download Instiki and omit step 1, installing Ruby. See? Told you it was easier for you.

[2] For more advanced users comfortable with wiki syntax and with a server that supports PHP and MySQL, I’d highly recommend the more fully-featured and free MediaWiki which powers the venerable Wikipedia.

[3] For more information about giving your wiki a memorable domain name, see previous Lifehacker feature Assign a domain name to your home server.

Die Dulci Fruere