Installation

The recommend way of running An Otter Wiki is via docker compose. For deploying in kubernetes via Helm.

Requirements

The CPU requirements are pretty low, you can run it on a Raspberry Pi 1 A (ARMv6). The RAM required is around 100MiB (according to docker stats). The required disk storage depends on the content, please keep in mind, that the backend is a git repository that never forgets: Deleting a page or an attachment does not free up any space. The wiki needs no internet access. Clients using the wiki need only access to the server running the wiki, so it can run in an environment which is isolated from the internet.

As URLs as dedicated domain (e.g. wiki.domain.tld) is required, it can not be mapped into a subfolder.

Client requirement: Javascript must be activated in your browser to use the wiki.

Using docker cli

An Otter Wiki is published as a Docker image on Docker hub as redimp/otterwiki. The stable images are build for the plattforms amd64, arm64, armv7 and armv6.

Make sure you have docker installed.

To run an otter wiki via docker cli, listening on port 8080 and using a local directory for data persistency, use the following command:

docker run --name otterwiki \
    -p 8080:80 \
    -v $PWD/app-data:/app-data \
    redimp/otterwiki:2

Open the wiki via http://127.0.0.1:8080 if you are running the docker command on your machine.

You can configure the application with environment variables e.g.

-e SITE_NAME="My Wiki" -e SITE_DESCRIPTION="An otter wiki run via docker"

For all configuration options please see Configuration.

Using docker compose

The recommended way of running An Otter Wiki is via docker compose.

Create a docker-compose.yaml file

services:
  otterwiki:
    image: redimp/otterwiki:2
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    volumes:
      - ./app-data:/app-data

Run docker compose up -d
Access the wiki via http://127.0.0.1:8080 if run on your machine.
Register your account. The first account is an admin-account with access to the application settings. The first accounts email address doesn't need to be confirmed nor has the account to be activated.
Customize the settings to your liking.
It's highly recommended to use a webserver as reverse proxy to connect to the docker process, see Reverse Proxy below.

Alternativly you can configure the application using environment variables, for example:

services:
  otterwiki:
    image: redimp/otterwiki:2
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
    - 8080:80
    volumes:
    - ./app-data:/app-data
    environment:
      MAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER: no-reply@example.com
      MAIL_SERVER: smtp.server.tld
      MAIL_PORT: 465
      MAIL_USERNAME: otterwiki@example.com
      MAIL_PASSWORD: somepassword
      MAIL_USE_SSL: True

For all configuration options please see Configuration.

podman and podman-compose

An Otter Wiki can be run with podman and podman-compose in the same way as withdocker and docker compose please see above.

Important

If you are running podman in an SELinux environment, please check the FAQ section about environments with SELinux.

The `-slim` image variant

The image of An Otter Wiki runs as root user (with uid=0) and comes bundled with nginx that listens on port 80. The lighter image variant is the -slim image: It's based on alpine, has no nginx bundled and an uWSGI server is running as unprivileged www-data user (with uid=33). uWSGI serves both An Otter Wiki and the static files and listens on port 8080.

Except for the exposes port, the images are interchangeable. For example a docker-compose.yaml running the most recent version of a -slim image:

services:
  otterwiki:
    image: redimp/otterwiki:2-slim
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    volumes:
      - ./app-data:/app-data

The redimp/otterwiki:2-slim image is as stable as the 'fat' image, after all it is what is running otterwiki.com.

Kubernetes

An Otter Wiki can be conveniently deployed on kubernetes using the official Helm Chart. For example you can create a new deployment with an ingress on otterwiki.example.com with

helm install otterwiki-example \
  --set config.SITE_DESCRIPTION="An Otter Wiki deployed with Helm" \
  --set ingress.enabled=true \
  --set ingress.hosts[0].host="otterwiki.example.com" \
  --version 0.1.0 \
  oci://registry-1.docker.io/redimp/otterwiki

Please refer to the chart for a detailed README with instructions, more examples and informations about the default values of the chart.

From source as WSGI application with uwsgi

Install the prerequisites

i. Debian / Ubuntu
```
apt install git build-essential python3-dev python3-venv
```
ii. RHEL8 / Fedora / CentOS8 / Rocky Linux 8
```
yum install make python3-devel
```

Clone the otterwiki repository and enter the directory

git clone https://github.com/redimp/otterwiki.git
cd otterwiki

Create and initialize the repository where the otterwiki data lives

mkdir -p app-data/repository
# initialize the empty repository
git init -b main app-data/repository

Create a minimal settings.cfg e.g. via

echo "REPOSITORY='${PWD}/app-data/repository'" >> settings.cfg
echo "SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI='sqlite:///${PWD}/app-data/db.sqlite'" >> settings.cfg
echo "SECRET_KEY='$(python -c 'import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex())')'" >> settings.cfg

Create a virtual environment and install An Otter Wiki

python3 -m venv venv
./venv/bin/pip install -U pip uwsgi
./venv/bin/pip install .

Run uwsgi listening on the localhost port 8080

export OTTERWIKI_SETTINGS=$PWD/settings.cfg
./venv/bin/uwsgi --http 127.0.0.1:8080 --master --enable-threads --die-on-term -w otterwiki.server:app

Open http://127.0.0.1:8080 in your browser.
Register your account. The first account is an admin-account with access to the application settings.
Alternatively can you configure the application using the settings.cfg. For all configuration options please see Configuration.
Create a service file e.g. /etc/systemd/system/otterwiki.service

[Unit]
Description=uWSGI server for An Otter Wiki

[Service]
User=www-data
Group=www-data
Environment=OTTERWIKI_SETTINGS=/path/to/the/settings.cfg
ExecStart=/path/to/an/otterwiki/env/bin/uwsgi --http 127.0.0.1:8080 --enable-threads --die-on-term -w otterwiki.server:app
SyslogIdentifier=otterwiki

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

make sure to adapt the /path/to and that the configured User can read and write the database and the repository folder.

Run systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl start otterwiki.service, check systemctl status otterwiki.service for errors.

Note

It's highly recommended to use a webserver as reverse proxy to connect to uwsgi, see Reverse Proxy below.

If you want to skip the reverse proxy consider to bind uwsgi not to just the local ip 127.0.0.1, but to all ips of the host running An Otter Wiki with --http 0.0.0.0:8080.

Reverse Proxy

A reverse proxy is a server that sits in front of web servers and forwards client (e.g. web browser) requests to those web servers. They are useful when hosting multiple services on a host and make it much easier to configure https. Neither An Otter Wiki itself nor the in the docker image provides https.

Mini how-tos for configuring Apache, NGINX and Caddy are provided below. For complete documention please check the corresponding software documention.

NGINX

This is a minimal example of a config that configures NGINX as a reverse proxy. The full documentation about NGINX as reverse proxy can be found here.

It's assumed that An Otter Wiki is running either in a docker container or as a uwsgi process and listening on port 8080.

server {
    server_name wiki.domain.tld;
    listen 80;
    location / {
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $http_host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
        client_max_body_size 64M; # for attachments of a size up to 64 Mb
    }
}

NGINX on Debian, Ubuntu and derivates

Install nginx via apt install -y nginx
Create the otterwiki.conf in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
Check the syntax via nginx -t
Restart nginx via systemctl restart nginx
Open http://wiki.domain.tld in your browser
Check journalctl -xeu nginx and /var/log/nginx/error.log for errors.

NGINX on RHEL, CentOS, Rocky and derivates

Install nginx via dnf install nginx
Start NGINX and enable at boot: sudo systemctl enable --now nginx
With SELinux enabled, make sure httpd can connect using setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect on
Create the otterwiki.conf in /etc/nginx/conf.d/
Check the syntax via nginx -t
Restart nginx via systemctl restart nginx
Open http://wiki.domain.tld in your browser
Check journalctl -xeu nginx and /var/log/nginx/error.log for errors.

See https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/setting-reverse-proxies-nginx for a complete guide.

Apache

This is a minimal example how to configure Apache as reverse proxy. Please see the Apache documentation for complete details.