What is Reddit's opinion of
BookStack?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
95 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I'd probably say Bookstack. Dan Brown switched to a much saner versioning scheme, has really piled on the improvements, and even put out an install walkthrough a couple days ago. All of this on top of an already rock-solid app.
I think I've had more news articles about that app in OurComposeCast recently than any other app. Except maybe Nextcloud. But that's because they ALWAYS have something new going on.
Look at this: https://www.bookstackapp.com/
My personal wiki is xwiki, it can be customized to the last bit, but it is a moloch. For our documentation, we have settled on BookStack.
Ok sorry about that.. how about bookstack ? I use it for my daily note taking in my current IT job also has great structure. It's open source, just throw it in a lamp stack and your good to go. https://www.bookstackapp.com
By journal you mean diary?
Anyway, mentioning bookstack as it should be mentioned. Though its more like wiki, documentation organization, than a daily thing, But of course making books for years and chapters for months and pages for days is very easy.
I'm a fan of BookStack - It's a Laravel-based wiki-style framework with a few differences. It's designed with "shelves", "books", "chapters" and "pages", but there is some flexibility and the ability to easily link between sections.
I personally like it a bit more than the total free-form wiki nature. It's excellent for notes and documentation.
Here is a demo to play with
You can also explore https://www.bookstackapp.com/ , it should work on any popular PHP hosting. This is if you want to write a book using it.
If you want to build a website / blog around your book then Wordpress is good.
If you have not yet looked at Bookstack I find it to be slick. It's easy as pie to use, and has a really nice formatting system. I finally got my documentation out of my head with it!
Bookstack. It's like a personal Wiki but without the 1000 features you won't use anyway. Clean, easy way to organize information as well as drafted info to organize later. Couldn't do my work without it. It also has built in draw.io support.
Over the last 7 months or so I've been working on building BookStack. Hopefully this might be what you're looking for. The page the link leads to has a link to a demo so you can try it out, including the editing and admin areas.
It's PHP (built on laravel) and has built up a decent feature set. It does have PDF page export (As well as contained html & plaintext) but it uses a fairly basic library so using a 'print as PDF' option still usually provides a better result.
If you have any questions about it just give me a shout :)
I switched to this a few years back and will second this suggestion. I had used mediawiki and onenote in the past. In addition to what others have said, permissions functionality is good, recycle bin, good auditing, mfa integration.
The developer sometimes shows up here and also mods over at /r/bookstack. There is a demo to try https://www.bookstackapp.com/#demo
For documentation, I've been looking at https://www.bookstackapp.com/
Has support for SSO which would then use MFA.
There is no specific plugin system for BookStack but I'm slowly opening up parts of it over time. I've written this page on parts of BookStack you can hack around with: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/hacking-bookstack/
The "Theme System" is quite powerful. Technically you can customise override any individual view file, icon or interface text string. The "Custom HTML Head Option" is used most often, just for things like tweaking styles or fonts in the system, but essentially is an easy way to add some code to each page.
BookStack uses system fonts by default, to be efficient and somewhat generic, but setting a custom font can have a fair effect on readability and design.
In regards to content layout, it really depends on your workflow and content. You can keep it small-scale at first, not using shelves unless required, then scale up and split out your content to extra books as you grow.
I'm curious what organizational issues you had. I find the hierarchical book/chapter/page along with the ability to move/sort chapters and pages is enough for most documentation purposes.
I will say that I use it for the simplicity of the layout, and the editor is pretty good My only complaints are the default styles and pasting from other sources. For example, different lines of text are place inside a p element, and there is an extra break in the default p style, and you can't directly paste from Google Docs the last time I tried, at least, so I've embedded any documentation written there.
I don't have time to write a full tutorial, but at least for testing. You can get a VM, VirtualBox is free and useful for testing.
Install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on it, there are tons of guides on doing this if you aren't familiar.
From BookStack's Install directions here:
Use these commands in order:
# Ensure you have read the above information about what this script does before executing these commands.
# Download the script wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BookStackApp/devops/master/scripts/installation-ubuntu-16.04.sh
# Make it executable chmod a+x installation-ubuntu-16.04.sh
# Run the script with admin permissions sudo ./installation-ubuntu-16.04.sh
Fair warning, most of these commands are harmless in this instance but usually downloading a script from the internet, and executing it is a bad idea (at least without looking at the script first)
You should check out BookStack. It's open source, it has Draw.IO integrated and typical versioning features. I've been really impressed with it. It also has OAuth to integrate with IAM's. It's the best OSS solution I've found for documentation / wiki.
/u/0924ryno my own dnd group just began using https://www.bookstackapp.com and we really enjoy it. I think you should be able to view this link and browse this book. Just another idea to throw in the hat.
I came here to post BookStack, there is a script run the script on Ubuntu and the system reboots and you can connect to the IP. Took me all of maybe 10 minutes to be up and running. I'm running it on a tiny ubuntu VM without any issues (1 core, 512mb ram).
Hi, BookStack dev here.
BookStack can do pretty much all the requested apart from file uploads but that has been requested by a few so is something I'd like to get done soon.
Something to note is that the documentation is a bit weak at the moment so there's probably a few features that aren't shown on the website or docs like a markdown editor and tagging system. Also, It's not very flexible yet in terms of customizability (Only basic naming, colors & logo) so if that's what you're after the bolt/grav suggestions will likely be more suitable.
The target function of BookStack is pretty much the same as DokuWiki but the content structure and design is much more opinionated so I'd suggest giving the demo a quick go to see how it feels before setting it up.
I've been developing BookStack which is kind of an open-source opinionated version of confluence with a set structure so might be of interest to you.
If everyone on the team is happy with markdown then, like many others have said, storing markdown in a git repo is ideal and there are loads of great markdown to HTML documentation generators out there. This method has the benefits of full versioning and clean source format (Easy to move and transfer) compared to confluence or BookStack.
It might depend on how you build content on your site. I'm often doing things quite manual hence keep it simple but if you're building on some kind of dynamic back-end, where you can auto-generate the formats and sizes, then you might aswell enjoy the efficiency. My internet's not too slow but I have a thing for efficiency. I try to aim for the old rule of less than 1MB download for a page total on a cold cache. This is a recent page that acts as an example of that. Sits at ~900KB transfer from fresh on a page that has a banner image, code-block-highlighting and a range of content images.
Also, You may also want to think outside of filesize alone. If an internet connect is slow due to latency then things may feel slow due to each request taking time to connect, transfer the image data, then close before being free to download another image. This can be most impactful when there are a lot of requests being made at the same time. For such scenarios ensuring that you're using HTTP2 can be important since it allows HTTP multiplexing where multiple resources (Including images) can stream down through a single connection. You can see an example of this here.
I like the Bookstack. Open source, free, local, simple to maintain. Favorite feature is the integration with Draw.io that helps me a lot since I do lots of network and services diagrams .
It is based on laravel, but I got that info from the admin documentation:
https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/subdirectory-setup/
I also just literally had to do this on my own setup this week to get bookstack working publicly from behind an nginx reverse proxy.
Can you ssh in?
The DB can be backed up with:
sudo mysqldump -u root bookstack > bookstack.backup.sql
Files from the /var/www/bookstack dir:
tar -czvf bookstack-files-backup.tar.gz .env public/uploads storage/uploads
I have an alias for a full backup for my own instance:
alias backup='cd ~ && sudo mysqldump -u root bookstack > bookstack.backup.sql && sudo tar -czvf bookstack-files-backup.tar.gz --absolute-names /var/www/bookstack/.env /var/www/bookstack/public/uploads /var/www/bookstack/storage/uploads /var/www/bookstack/wkhtmltopdf ~/.bashrc /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini'
Restore DB with:
sudo mysql -u root bookstack < bookstack.backup.sql
Restore Files with:
tar -xvzf bookstack-files-backup.tar.gz
After trying a bunch of different open source products (including confluence), we settled on Bookstack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/). It's easy to set up and use, and doesn't have a lot of the extra crud confluence has.
Another vote for Bookstack. We use it and have way older users consuming and contributing content. WAY easier than mediawiki or any other wiki I've used since Mindtouch stabbed their wiki users in the back. It's FOSS and has a very active developer too.
- Home wiki: Bookstack
- Contacts: Monica
- a couple custom internal websites (one is a custom viewer of old AIM chat logs I found on my old laptop from ~2008)
- the "entertainment" stack: emby, sonarr, radarr, jackett
- custom arch repo
- rkt container host (they all run in rkt containers) - this houses custom base images that other things can be based on
- custom scanner daemon that interfaces with SANE (details)
- printing (CUPS server)
Are you 100% sold on Dokuwiki?
I got sick of how poorly maintained the plugins were and how painful it was to do updates (someone else mentioned it, they don't properly handle it with package managers). So I dumped it for Bookstack, haven't looked back.
Could be worth a look at BookStack. Installation can be a pain if not familiar with modern PHP apps but a docker solution is available.
Any questions give me a shout.
No worries.
To provide some context, or potential case study, I had the idea to build a documentation platform. Initially thought that should be quite simple, just connect up a WYSIWYG editor to a database to store the information.
The initial 6 months of development was rapid, the design and ideas changed multiple times until I got the right feel and theme/name down. I have a blogpost showing this here. I then made this open source and shared it on Reddit.
6 years later I'm still spending a lot of time on it. Development is much slower than that initial time since there's so much more to think about due to the growth (User stability, upgrade process, translations, accessibility, right-to-left language support, customizations, multiple auth standards, APIs etc...). In addition, non-development work (Stuff I never envisioned) takes up more time/effort; Things like issue management, community support, pull request reviewing, sponsorship management.
You can't really fully envision the issues/scaling/requests/features that you'll hit as you grow/progress. You often need to just start walking down that path to light the way, but you can often move quicker at the start of that journey.
Yeah, This is probably the most direct way. Mount (Or maybe even symlink) paths to match. The default paths used can be seen on this page: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/upload-config/#storage-options
As a more complicated alternative, you could host something like minio, with minio files stored on the volume, then configure BookStack via the "Non-Amazon, S3 Compatible Services" option in the link above.
Probably easier to go the mount path but the second may be useful if you generally need an s3-like storage system for any other apps you might have.
Right in the Bookstack documentation, where one might expect it to be lol. https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/installation/
In fact, if you Google "Bookstack default login" you don't even need to tap a link, it's literally right there.
I've never heard of anyone using that Azure deployable. Might be fine but not official in any way. I usually just host on a VPS, Doesn't need a whole lot of resources.
I attempt to keep things stable with a stable upgrade path. I try to ensure any potentially breaking changes are listed on the updates page. Viewing that should give a good reference as to the frequency and size of such changes. The main one is a change in minimum required PHP version every so often.
Appreciate the response, but this is more like Wordpress than software to create a book. It does have PDF export as an option, but it seems like that it just for a page (https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/pdf-rendering/), not an actual book or publication.
You mean importing the old db changing the name on the new container and then importing the rest? The database still wouldn’t be compatible I think. There aren’t many migrate steps to do. Barely 2 command https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/backup-restore/
If you only need to have two groups, i.e. public and private you can set one book/shelf the way you want it all to be configured and then use the CLI to copy those permissions to the rest of the books/shelves.
​
See here for more information:
No problem! If the APP_URL has changed since you're previous hosting, and you had previously-created content in your system, you may need to run the "Update System URL" command as detailed here: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/commands/
That command will update any older URL references in the database.
If you need assistance again the BookStack discord can be a good place to ask.
Ideally create Custom Post Type + Advanced Custom Field + Gravity forms. But that could be a little too complicated for you.
There are plugins to add KB features but honestly I wouldn't use wordpress. I would use something like https://www.bookstackapp.com/ it's an open source clean wiki platform. We use it for our documentation
I agree with this. Evernote seems to be such a simple concept, but what it does, it does really well. Especially when it comes to things like PDFs and other attachments. I've been playing around with my own implementation for the last year or so but I've never gotten close to anything like what evernote can do.
I have also been interested in playing around with BookStack, but I've never been able to get it working. It's a self-hosted web application, so you'll need a web server to run it on.
The only kind of metadata like that in BookStack are tags. Tags can have both a name and value, and can be searched upon, but display and usage of them would probably not really suit your use-case there as they are not within the flow of the content.
I built what is essentially the current permissions system as part of v0.7.6, released March 2016: https://www.bookstackapp.com/blog/beta-release-v0-7-6/
We are running on Ubuntu Server because that is what is documented by Bookstack, see: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/installation/
You could probably make it work on something else if you really, really wanted to, but why if Ubuntu is documented and works.
I *strongly recommenf you enable LDAP: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/ldap-auth/ makes management much easier.
I also use Bookstack for this, and it's super easy to copy and paste adn add photos of the recipe, and the search works really well. The tagging makes it super easy to categorize your recipes too.
There is something about Confluence that I just hate, and they are moving to cloud only soon, which makes it an even worse choice. A couple options are:
- BookStack - https://www.bookstackapp.com/
- MediaWiki - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor comes bundled with it now, but needs to be configured.
Yes, I love taking notes and documenting my thoughts. I had a professor tell me 'if it wasn't documented it didn't happen' and I think that changed my perspective on things.
There is a pretty good free, open-source platform called Bookstack that is usually used for internal documentation for teams. It requires a bit of technical setup but I have found using it to organize thoughts is pretty effective. Here's a link to it if anyone is interested link
I started using it a few months ago and simply love it. It's basically like a Wiki system. I have it deployed in AWS myself, just a really small instance. Plus free never hurts.
It all depends on how you best organize your data. I totally need to do this as well. I've been looking for some sort of app/web app to do this, or it could be something as simple as a Google Doc sort of thing.
Someone mentioned https://www.bookstackapp.com/ the other day which seems pretty cool and supports SSO, which is normally a tax.
Really depends on what you need to write the docs for and who writes the docs. Basically you could go with some kind of static site generator that takes Markdown as a document source. This is more manual work, but you're usuallly also more flexible that way.
VuePress, Docusaurus, Slate and others come to mind.
If you are looking for something that can easily be used by non-technical folks as well BookStack is worth a shot.
All options named are free and open-source. But if you do decide to use the software for your company I highly advise you to donate money to the developers. Disclaimer: I use BookStack both professionally and for personal projects and my experience has been great.
Have you tried Bookstack, it is capable of uploading attachments? https://www.bookstackapp.com/
The concept of Shelves, Books, Chapters, Pages is cool and will let you organize your content easily. The UI is intuitive enough, works ok on mobile.
I believe you need to edit you book stack env file.
Cache & Session Configuration
> # Only send cookies over a HTTPS connection.
> # Ensure you have BookStack served over HTTPS before enabling.
> # Defaults to 'false'
> SESSION_SECURE_COOKIE=true
Edit: looks like you might have other issues too based on that screenshot. You can enable debugging and see if that yields any insight.
The big problem is the transient nature of our business. There's no point documenting specific technology when it's constantly evolving and your documentation becomes dated.
The big thing is documenting procedures, not steps (despite that sounding similar). I use bookstack for our platform, but honestly you can use whatever platform you like. It's largely inconsequential (regardless of what people like to believe).
What's important is you understand the logical process behind going from a desire to a solution. This is where infrastructure as code is great, IE: docker. Docker-compose in particular basically does this for you. It's so much easier to say "Here's this config file that describes exactly the infrastructure I require, where the data is kept, and how to do it again from scratch". It's great. At that stage, if someone else knows docker, you're already done. The wiki can just be there for telling people where to look.
Git repositories are for the "how". Wikis are for the "why". Anything else can be superfluous.
>https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/hacking-bookstack/
u/ssddanbrown Are there any options for customizing the HTML export? I was wondering how feasible it would be to hack the export to include something like a search box and sticky chapter/page nav in a sidebar so the export is more like that of a static site generator.
Good documentation should:
- make note of what environment(s) it will or will not work in as a preface
- use appropriate formatting to ensure important steps are not blending into regular text
- have some sort of revision history associated with it so you can get an idea of how long it's been since the process has been given any attention
- organized into whatever hierarchy works for you. For one org that might be specific to a system/topology, for others it might be a lot of little procedural processes that are better organized through tagging the topics.
- document with the intent to automate. Maybe not today, but someday down the line. Procedural articles are basically pseudocode for what steps automation would take.
- document not just the procedural "if this happens, do xyz" stuff. Also document the larger questions like evaluating tools/services and why certain options were deemed not a good fit/nonstarter. You and others are probably not going to accurately recall this down the road.
I've noted many times on this topic I like using two particular tools for documentation:
dokuwiki because it's easy to set up and accomplishes a lot of what you would want to document and organize procedural operations.
bookstack for longer form material like technical specs, postmortems, and white papers since it's easier to document in chunks and reorganize appropriately into a "book" rather than merge, shuffle, etc. multiple articles in a traditional wiki and try to assert some logical order to it. It also exports out which is nice if you're documenting and it becomes the output for a report.
MediaWiki is absolutely one of the best Wikis out there.But, for projects that require documentation but not necessarily in Wiki form (like Minecraft server documentation), I've opted for Bookstack.
I was just trying Standard Notes and like you, the overall editing just didn't seem right. I'm now trying "BookStack" and it reminds me very much of Quip with 2 major improvements over it in fact.
Code editing on Quip has never quite worked right for us at work (so was weary of even considering it for myself at home) and Copy/Paste doesn't always maintain formatting on Quip either. Both of these issues don't seem to exist on BookStack.
Here's the documentation if you'd like. It runs fine so far on 1 core, 1Gb ram and 10Gb of space (i'd add more if you plan on using attachments) on an instance of Ubuntu Server (I just created a VM on my FreeNAS server at home). It'll take you next to no time at all to get it initially setup. All it requires is a fresh install of the OS, the install script will take care of the rest.
I installed my on a Ubuntu/Apache Server. Not really sure how to do it on Windows.
I am assuming you tried these methods? https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/installation/#docker
Most wiki's will require a backend DB. Atlassian Confluence would meet your needs expect for cost. Maybe something like https://www.bookstackapp.com/ would work for you or another open source product.
I've been documenting everything as of late for that reason alone. If you haven't seen it - or heard of it - try BookStack. Trivial to spin up a docker image (LinuxServer.io even has a well-maintained image).
I know this is a little off topic, but it has helped me tremendously, and I'm hoping maybe it'll help others who want a nice turnkey solution that even does markdown.
I haven't used this yet but found it interesting and looked at the website. Is the shelf checkbox in their search screenshot what you need? the example
In addition to nextcloud as mentioned, maybe consider bookstack.
You create chapters/books/pages - you could have a chapter on a course, and a page for some material on it. You can write on the page like a wiki (to add information) and you can attach files/images directly to the page as attachments. You can upload videos/images and have them show in line.
It’s also got a robust tagging system with key value pairs, users with a permissions hierarchy and you can leave comments on each other’s pages.
I don't know if you're going through this, so this'll be totally unsolicited advice, but I once spent a shit ton of time researching the "best" solution for organizing designs, ideas, etc. After wasting that time, I found that there really is no "best" software for compiling ideas, but there's probably a solution that makes it most enjoyable for you and that's what is truly important. Emacs org-mode might be crazy efficient, but if you enjoy doodling out ideas on a piece of paper more, that's gonna be way better for you because you're going to feel more motivated. Ramble over, anyway:
I don't use this for bugs, but I love using BookStack for writing up design documents, random ideas, etc. It's just a wiki software you can host yourself on a web server with a very clean interface. Everything is split into books, chapters, and pages for neat organization.
It's probably overkill compared to just a plain 'ol notebook or a simple note-taking software, but I enjoy self-hosting stuff and since the front page displays my most recent activity (like a page was last updated 23 hours ago), it kinda motivates me to continually type out new ideas or revise old ones.
A good self-hosted alternative to one-note is Bookstack. I have been using it for about a month and it has functioned very well. The only downside is you have to be connected to the internet at all times. But you can attach images/videos. The UI scales to mobile very well. Here is the link to the Official Bookstack website. https://www.bookstackapp.com/ They have a demo on there site so you can try it out before you decide anything.
Bookstack App.
We use it internally across 7 different departments including all of I.T. info. Exportable and version controllable if you have auditing / ISO / other regulations.
I'd suggest putting the time in to maintain good documentation for your homelab. Diagrams, troubleshooting notes, configuration information, etc. If you'd like to host an actual platform for that, I use BookStack and like it, but how you keep it is less significant than that you keep it and keep it current and organized. It will remind you of how things are set up when you inevitably have to work on a piece of your lab that you haven't thought about in months, it's a good habit to develop on a professional level, and it's something you can include with a resume or bring to an interview to show the kinds of stuff you're working on.
We use Bookstack https://www.bookstackapp.com/ for our documentation. It's very easy to handle and to setup. But most important it's opensource.
You can try it out in their website whether you like it or not.
Honestly I would use pure wiki open source websites which use the latest technologies and gets deployed as easy as WordPress.
I personally use bookstack https://www.bookstackapp.com/ and it's the best thing I used so far . Has everything you need
Use onenote.
Otherwise I must say, the best I found was bookstack
But it is exactly the opposite of what you want - difficult to setup and operate, requiring linux and selfhosting knowledge. Though end result is that you have webpage you can give someone and they can colaborate and all of you can access it from wherever...
Actually its not that difficult, nowadays with docker, everything is so much easier... but still way out of grasp of regular people who would need invest time and effort to get it going.
The website of your provider says you can use SSH, so you should be fine with manual installation.
Of course you can't change the config directly so you must change the docroot in your hosters panel.
I am shocked no one mentioned bookstack yet as it checks all the requirements.
Hands down the best and modern wiki documentation IMO.
Everything else feels ancient compared to it.
/edit
oh, right, I am in /r/software not /r/selfhosted or /r/homeserver or some other shit. Well, that does throw a wrench in to plans unless you go and learn docker and linux.
Look into configuring a virtual host with the subdomain on it. That should contain the subdomain and path to your code. That should work.
I actually run a very different docker based setup, but I'm willing to bet the manual install will do what you want: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/installation/
Can it be selfhosted or do you want a hosted solution?
I personally use bookstack ( https://www.bookstackapp.com/ ) as personal documentation solution. It looks a little bit nicer than a Mediawiki and it perfectly is enough for my needs. As it's web-based there is no need for cross-platform. But there is no dedicated App for mobile devices as far as I know if that's something you need.
It sounds like a lot of you use some form of personal knowledge base. I just wanted to see how many folks out there are actually maintaining their own stores of KB stuff outside of work.
I will be using Bookstack as my knowledge base, if I end up doing this.
Go the wiki route. People have recommended Confluence, but there are other options like dokuwiki and other similar ilk. If you're looking at creating documentation on various subject matter, Bookstack to avoid a lot of breadcrumbing across topics of disparate contexts.
The biggest advantage with going the wiki route is getting away from outdated or outright wrong information. Almost all allow for viewing who edited what content and if you think your team is mature enough for it, allow for article commenting which can be useful if there are dedicated SMEs or individuals who essentially own articles/topics. They also generally supports embedded code snippets (though I personally advocate for linking to an appropriate repository so you're not maintaining code inside an article) for the technical bits.
BookStack is what we use to accommodate our documentation.
You can create object hierarchy like Shelves > Books > Chapters > Pages.
You can also create groups and User Roles and assign which role of users will have access to given Shelve, Book, Chapter or Page.
Looks beautiful as well.
I'm a fan of BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/) still in it's infancy, but open source and the dev regularly updates. I like that it's focus is keeping it simple. The wiki's that I looked for just had too much going on. You can add attachments to pages fine, and the WYSIWYG editor lets you paste formatted code.
It's only available as a self-hosted option so make sure you're backing up the web site and attachments before deploying.
​
Not sure what your exact situation is but I just setup solidnerd's container this morning. Only thing I notice that can screw it up was using the latest mysql vs the v5.7.21 they specify. It wouldn't work for me on the latest mysql for whatever. Reason. If you have an existing instance to can always backup and restore.
It might be worth learning how to build your own container image, it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. You can use an existing Bookstack Dockerfile as a guide, like this. Bookstack is not difficult to install manually either using the official instructions.
I would like to give a +1 for confluence as well. you can pay 10$ for up to 10 users, it is very much a SharePoint competitor. I have deployed Confluence internally at our ORG currently we have about 250 users, many collaborative features including real-time document editing. The other option that wasn't on the self-hosted list is book stack https://www.bookstackapp.com/ I run this at home and have found it to be a breath of fresh air vs the feature-rich nature of confluence.
I'm a huge fan of BookStack and use it quite a lot. The best selfhosted alternative to evernote by my standards and requirements. (which are: selfhosted, Markdown support, tags and search functionality)
OneNote
Nothing else comes close to it, as its free and powerful and well made, with clients for windows, macos, android, ios,... except damn linux :[
if its more like documentation and organization of informations then bookstack is my favorite, but you would need to be technically capable to self host.
A better place for this would be /r/selfhosted though you will get non-python answers too. Bookstack may fit the bill, though I have never used it myself.
Just FYI, building your own (you said "need to build a site", emphasis added, so I am assuming you're doing some of your own coding) is a double-edged sword in terms of security. On the one hand, you are much less of a target since the payoff is much lower. On the other, you are likely not a security expert. There are almost certainly vulnerabilities you won't be able to account for. Personally, I built my own but it is a risk.
Finally, have you considered something like Squarespace? Obviously the other end of the spectrum, but nice and easy! (I have no affiliation other than helping my dad who uses it)
Should be - here are the installation requirements https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/installation/#manual (I just spun up a ubuntu vm in Hyper-V for ease of installation using their script, though).
That screenshot they have on the homepage: https://www.bookstackapp.com/images/bookstack-hero-screenshot.png
Doesn't that take too much screen space? Small laptops with 1366x768 native resolution won't view it well.
Sorry for the self-promotion, but if you don't mind running something less battle-tested Bookstack may suit you: https://www.bookstackapp.com
Install process can be a bit of a faff but there's some scripts and guides available to help.
My current setup:
- Scattered text files for documentation, hints and tips
- DokuWiki for documentation/inventory
- KeePass for passwords and serials
But I'm considering moving the documentation over to Bookstack as my current 'documentation' is a mess, mediawiki doesn't do what I want right out of the box, and bookstack looks like it does.
I heavily use OneNote for tracking information, personal and at work. I'm mildly concerned about how this will continue going forward. Have been looking at BookStack as a possible self-hosted alternative. It's an open source well-featured webapp, and looks good too. Doesn't look like a direct analogue to OneNote but it may be close enough.
We use BookStack for our documentation. It's free and open source and looks like it should fit all your needs. Easy to organize documentation and allows for users /user management of certain pages.
BookStack is what we use, it forces organization into Books > Chapters > Pages. You could easily have a "Book" called "Changelog" where each "Chapter" is a server or application and each "Page" is a date of change.
I don't use the changelog format myself but would love to. It's getting everyone else to follow it is the real problem.
Bonus round, one I was trying to remember as I was writing the above reply;
For future installations I am thinking about going 100% BookStack. It's a wiki platform that has an incredible usability and user interface.
Yes, it's MIT license, very libre free, open source.
Having that said, it would have to be very good to make it pry Dokuwiki out of my hands :).
I recently setup BookStack and wrote up a post for installing it on CentOS 7 while I was at it.
I am looking at BookStack to replace my Confluence setup (Java is so resource hungry, and I hate paying for maintenance if I want to upgrade) and it seems, at least for me, that BookStack is the best replacement (although doesn't have all of the features of Confluence, it has what I need). Just thought I'd share.
I like to test new JavaScript things every so often by updating my reddit image viewer every so often. Github Link.
Otherwise, My main project keeping me busy is BookStack, built on laravel/PHP.
Just a tip, Try to create something you'll actually use as it will give you the motivation to keep working on it and makes development a lot more fun.