Inside Out
Notes on seeking wisdom and crafting software

Setup moinmoin as a personal wiki

ℹ️ The text describes the installation and usage of Moinmoin, a Python-based wiki engine for personal knowledge base purposes. The author explains their use scenarios, setup process, and references to other resources related to Moinmoin.

Moinmoin↗ is a wiki engine implemented in Python language.

**Use scenarios**

My purpose for this wiki is a personal [knowledge base](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_base "Knowledge base"). Mostly scattered with drafts, stuff that don't belong to my blogs. It will be a single user wiki. My focus is purely on adding content quickly, so I will prefer as less time on administration as possible.

I would love it to work across all my machines with minimal setup. May be I will put the wiki directory into dropbox or a private bitbucket repo and clone it on all machines.

I will be maintaining just the wiki data, updating moinmoin install will be managed by the most efficient `pacman` :)

**Setup**

sudo pacman -S moinmoincd ~/docs/noteswget https://bitbucket.org/thomaswaldmann/moin-1.9/raw/0265eec31d99/wikiserver.pywget https://bitbucket.org/thomaswaldmann/moin-1.9/raw/0265eec31d99/wikiserverconfig.pywget https://bitbucket.org/thomaswaldmann/moin-1.9/raw/0265eec31d99/wikiserverlogging.conf

Copy data/ and underlay/ files into your wiki instance.

cd ~/docs/notescp -rv /usr/share/moin/data/* datacp -rv /usr/share/moin/underlay/* underlay

I will be running moinmoin server with my user. So let's change the ownership of these directories to let server access them:

sudo chown -R arun:wheel datasudo chown -R arun:wheel underlaychmod -R 755 datachmod -R 755 underlay

Run the standalone server.

python2 wikiserver.py

That's it. You will be running a moinmoin instance at .

**References**

- John Goerzen has a [post](http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1182-moinmoin-as-a-personal-wiki-zen-to-done-and-a-bit-of-ikiwiki) on moinmoin, ZTD - Dirk Adlers' [page](http://moinmo.in/DirkAlders/MoinTemplates) at moinmoin wiki has templates for writing new Parser, Action or Macro to extend moinmoin

This post is for reference. Well after setting up, I didn't like the way moinmoin stores the wiki files (something like: *./data/PageName/revisions/*). So yet another didn't-work-for-me experiment, the story of personal wiki setup will continue in another post on [vimwiki](https://code.google.com/p/vimwiki/) :)