A wiki with a couchdb backend and django

Fri 28 August 2009 by Thejaswi Puthraya

Recently, I had a requirement for a personal simple wiki. I checked out various options like TiddlyWiki, MoinMoin and MediaWiki but wanted something very simple and something that didn't use a database server or flat files and was portable (and hostable). So I quickly wrote up a wiki that used couchdb as its backend and django for the web app.

Couchdb stores the revisions of the edits and so I could always revert to a previous version if required. It also saved me the need of installing an RDBMS.

I released the code for the app at github. It's quite rudimentary at the stage but should be good enough for personal use. Hopefully, with a little more time and effort, I should be able to achieve what I set out for. (Check a demo). Just create a page of your choice by directing your browser to it.

Note: User registration is blocked at the moment. But feel free to edit and create pages anonymously.

Interested in trying out the code on your machine?

INSTALL

Fetch the auth and sessions backends for couchdb from here and add them to the INSTALLED_APPS in your project's settings.py as per the instructions. Also requires couchdb-python.
Place the wiki app and reference it too in the INSTALLED_APPS.
Append the wiki/templates directory (with the absolute path) in the TEMPLATE_DIRS attribute of the settings.py.
Add a pointer to the wiki URL and account urls in your urls.py like

(r'^wiki/', include('wiki.urls'))
(r'^accounts/', include('django.contrib.auth.urls'))

Add the following attributes to your settings.py.

COUCHDB_HOST = 'http://path_to_couchdb_server:port_num/'
# If you don't want unauthenticated users to create
# pages, then set the below attribute to False
ALLOW_UNAUTH_PAGE_CREATION = True
# The below attribute is optional, if not specified
# it redirects to an empty page.
WELCOME_PAGE = '/path/to/default/star/up/page/'

Your wiki is ready!

Please let me know how you feel about this app.