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Update: I gave up on using Gollum. The benefits of using it were marginal at best vs just editing Markdown directly, and it didn't play well with my mkdocs setup (though I think this could have been fixed by telling MkDocs to look for Markdown files in a gollum subdirectory within this repository; I have no patience for this kind of tomfoolery / convoluted workarounds though).

I recently switched from MoinMoin to Gollum for my personal wiki. I'm using this page to list my justifications, as well as include any notes related to the transition.

Reasons to Use Gollum Over MoinMoin

  • I was the only user of my wiki, which kind of goes against the spirit of a proper wiki in the first place.
  • My MoinMoin instance lived on a reserved AWS t3.micro instance, which was costing me more money than I thought was justifiable for what I was getting out of it (at least for this use case). Since I already paid for a year upfront for this, I'm thinking of converting the reserved instance into a BOINC machine.
  • Regardless of any security measures I took (i.e., using AWS security groups, changing the SSH port- this only really improves security marginally at the expense of usability and might not have been super necessary since AWS enforces the use of key pairs, but I did it anyways because I was the only person using the machine and it didn't hurt) I would still get pounded by brute force login attempts on the (public-facing) web app's login page. I wanted to find a way to share my notes while not having to deal with bad actors at all, and having the wiki exist as a static site, with editing done locally on machines with Gollum installed, seemed like the best way to accomplish this. Using a static site should pretty much get rid of the attack space entirely on my end- since I'm planning on serving this with a gh-pages branch, security becomes GitHub's problem and I'm okay with that.

TODO

  • Find a way to convert Gollum pages into HTML automatically via a Travis job. I was thinking about using gollum-site, but it seems moribund / hasn't been updated in 6 years and I don't trust it. Most likely I'll use a Python script to convert Gollum-specific syntax into Markdown, and then use Pandoc to render HTML versions of all of the Markdown docs in wiki repository.
  • Find a way to automatically build a tree that people can navigate in the static site version.
  • Update any misc leftover MoinMoin syntax that is lingering about.
  • Remove the MoinMoin category designations at the end of some documents. I'm thinking that I'll drop a Gollum footer file in each of the sub-directories within the wiki repo that contains representation of where you're at in the tree, and that will be rendered instead.
  • Fix sidebar and links on main page.