The Little Ol’ Wiki From Pasadena

It seemed like a simple enough desire. I wanted a small, functional wiki with (roughly) the following features:

Use a git repository for page storage and version control
Map files on the filesystem directly to web pages (making it equally easy to edit from a CLI or from the web UI)
Render various wikitexts (particularly Markdown) into some appropriate output format
Support intra-page links and image includes, etc.
Be written in a language I am comfortable with

I considered several projects, including:

Hatta: Backed by a Mercurial repo, non-trivial to change
Giit: Written in Haskell. I had neither the time nor the inclination to learn that for this project.
Gollum: Mostly suitable, but written in Ruby (which isn’t my strong suit). Plus I wasn’t super-fond of the way it handled subdirectories and other complex filetypes.

But none of them quite scratched my itch. Thus, I was left with no choice but to write my own.

valet is a script that turns any directory into a simple wiki, complete with wikitext rendering, editing, and automatically committing changes to version control.

Here’s a short list of valet‘s features:

Single file, depending only on bottle
Handles navigating around the filesystem rooted where you start it
Automagically detects the type of various files, and (if you have the supporting Python libraries installed) renders them as they ought to appear. As a bonus, if you have pygments installed, source code will be syntax-highlighted where possible.
Changes from the web UI are automatically saved into the git repo (if desired)
Runs as a standalone service, serving from your local machine
Optionally supports CGI and WSGI; rename the script to something.cgi or something.fcgi and it will Do The Right Thing TM. This makes it suitable(-ish) for serving through Apache or some such with SSL, authentication, access control, etc. etc.
Installable with pip!

pip install valet

Hopefully this proves as useful to other people as it has been for me.

2013-08-22 12:00