Gitit
Gitit is a wiki program written in Haskell. It uses Happstack
for the web server and pandoc for markup processing. Pages and
uploaded files are stored in a git or darcs repository and may
be modified either by using the VCS's command-line tools or through the
wiki's web interface. By default, pandoc's extended version of markdown
is used as a markup language, but reStructuredText, LaTeX, or HTML
can also be used. Pages can be exported in a number of different
formats, including LaTeX, RTF, OpenOffice ODT, and MediaWiki markup.
Gitit can be configured to display TeX math (using texmath) and
highlighted source code (using highlighting-kate).
Other features include
-
plugins: dynamically loaded page transformations written in Haskell
(see "Network.Gitit.Interface")
-
categories
-
TeX math
-
syntax highlighting of source code files and code snippets (using
highlighting-kate)
-
caching
-
Atom feeds (site-wide and per-page)
-
a library, "Network.Gitit", that makes it simple to include a gitit
wiki in any happstack application
You can see a running demo at http://gitit.johnmacfarlane.net.
Getting started
Compiling and installing gitit
You'll need the GHC compiler and the cabal-install tool. GHC can
be downloaded here. Note that, starting with release 0.5, GHC 6.10
or higher is required. For cabal-install on *nix, follow the [quick
install][] instructions.
[quick install]: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/CabalInstall#Quick Installation on Unix
Once you've got cabal-install, installing gitit is trivial:
cabal update
cabal install gitit
These commands will install the latest released version of gitit.
To install a version of gitit checked out from the repository,
change to the gitit directory and type:
cabal install
The cabal
tool will automatically install all of the required haskell
libraries. If all goes well, by the end of this process, the latest
release of gitit will be installed in your local .cabal
directory. You
can check this by trying:
gitit --version
If that doesn't work, check to see that gitit
is in your local
cabal-install executable directory (usually ~/.cabal/bin
). And make
sure ~/.cabal/bin
is in your system path.
Optional syntax highlighting support
If pandoc was compiled with optional syntax highlighting support,
this will be available in gitit too. This feature is recommended
if you plan to display source code on your wiki.
Highlighting support requires the pcre library, so make sure that
is installed before continuing.
To install gitit with highlighting support, first ensure that pandoc
is compiled with highlighting support, then install gitit as above:
cabal install pandoc -fhighlighting --reinstall
cabal install gitit
Running gitit
To run gitit, you'll need git in your system path. (Or
darcs, if you're using darcs to store the wiki data.)
Gitit assumes that the page files (stored in the git repository) are
encoded as UTF-8. Even page names may be UTF-8 if the file system
supports this. So you should make sure that you are using a UTF-8 locale
when running gitit. (To check this, type locale
.)
Switch to the directory where you want to run gitit. This should be a
directory where you have write access, since three directories, static
,
templates
, and wikidata
, and two files, gitit-users
and gitit.log
,
will be created here. To start gitit, just type:
gitit
If all goes well, gitit will do the following:
- Create a git repository,
wikidata
, and add a default front page.
- Create a
static
directory containing files to be treated as
static files by gitit.
- Create a
templates
directory containing HStringTemplate templates
for wiki pages.
- Start a web server on port 5001.
Check that it worked: open a web browser and go to
http://localhost:5001.
Using gitit
For instructions on editing pages and creating links, see the "Help" page.
Gitit interprets links with empty URLs as wikilinks. Thus, in markdown
pages, [Front Page]()
creates an internal wikilink to the page Front Page
. In reStructuredText pages, `Front Page <>`_
has the same
effect.
If you want to link to a directory listing for a subdirectory, use a
trailing slash: [foo/bar/]()
creates a link to the directory for
foo/bar
.
Page metadata
Pages may optionally begin with a metadata block. Here is an example:
---
format: latex+lhs
categories: haskell math
toc: no
title: Haskell and
Category Theory
...
\section{Why Category Theory?}
The metadata block consists of a list of key-value pairs, each on a
separate line. If needed, the value can be continued on one or more
additional line, which must begin with a space. (This is illustrated by
the "title" example above.) The metadata block must begin with a line
---
and end with a line ...
optionally followed by one or more blank
lines. (The metadata block is a valid YAML document, though not all YAML
documents will be valid metadata blocks.)
Currently the following keys are supported:
format
: Overrides the default page type as specified in the configuration file.
Possible values are markdown
, rst
, latex
, html
, markdown+lhs
,
rst+lhs
, latex+lhs
. (Capitalization is ignored, so you can also
use LaTeX
, HTML
, etc.) The +lhs
variants indicate that the page
is to be interpreted as literate Haskell. If this field is missing,
the default page type will be used.
categories
: A space or comma separated list of categories to which the page belongs.
toc
: Overrides default setting for table-of-contents in the configuration file.
Values can be yes
, no
, true
, or false
(capitalization is ignored).
title
: By default the displayed page title is the page name. This metadata element
overrides that default.
Highlighted source code
If gitit was compiled against a version of pandoc that has highlighting
support (see above), you can get highlighted source code by using
delimited code blocks:
~~~ {.haskell .numberLines}
qsort [] = []
qsort (x:xs) = qsort (filter (< x) xs) ++ [x] ++
qsort (filter (>= x) xs)
~~~
To see what languages are available:
pandoc -v
Configuring and customizing gitit
Configuration options
You can set some configuration options when starting gitit, using the
option -f [filename]
. To get a copy of the default configuration file,
which you can customize, just type:
gitit --print-default-config > default.conf
The default configuration file is documented with comments throughout.
The static
directory
On receiving a request, gitit always looks first in the static
directory (or in whatever directory is specified for static-dir
in
the configuration file). If a file corresponding to the request is
found there, it is served immediately. If the file is not found in
static
, gitit next looks in the static
subdirectory of gitit's data
file ($CABALDIR/share/gitit-x.y.z/data
). This is where default css,
images, and javascripts are stored. If the file is not found there
either, gitit treats the request as a request for a wiki page or wiki
command.
So, you can throw anything you want to be served statically (for
example, a robots.txt
file or favicon.ico
) in the static
directory. You can override any of gitit's default css, javascript, or
image files by putting a file with the same relative path in static
.
Note that gitit has a default robots.txt
file that excludes all
URLs beginning with /_
.
Note: if you set static-dir
to be a subdirectory of repository-path
,
and then add the files in the static directory to your repository, you
can ensure that others who clone your wiki repository get these files
as well. It will not be possible to modify these files using the web
interface, but they will be modifiable via git.
Using darcs instead of git
By default, gitit will store wiki pages in a git repository in the
wikidata
directory. If you'd prefer to use darcs instead of git,
you need to add the following field to the configuration file:
repository-type: Darcs
This program may be called "darcsit" instead of "gitit" when a darcs
backend is used.
Note: we recommend that you use gitit/darcsit with darcs version
2.3.0 or greater. If you must use an older version of darcs, then
you need to compile the filestore library without the (default)
maxcount flag, before (re)installing gitit:
cabal install --reinstall filestore -f-maxcount
cabal install --reinstall gitit
Otherwise you will get an error when you attempt to access your
repository.
Changing the theme
To change the look of the wiki, you can modify custom.css
in
static/css
.
To change the look of printed pages, copy gitit's default print.css
to static/css
and modify it.
The logo picture can be changed by copying a new PNG file to
static/img/logo.png
.
To change the footer, modify templates/footer.st
.
For more radical changes, you can override any of the default
templates in $CABALDIR/share/gitit-x.y.z/templates
by copying
the file into templates
and modifying it. The page.st
template is
the master template; it includes the others. Interpolated variables are
surrounded by $
s, so literal $
must be backslash-escaped.
Adding support for math
To write math on a markdown-formatted wiki page, just enclose it
in dollar signs, as in LaTeX:
Here is a formula: $\frac{1}{\sqrt{c^2}}$
You can write display math by enclosing it in double dollar signs:
$$\frac{1}{\sqrt{c^2}}$$
Gitit can display TeX math in three different ways, depending on the
setting of math
in the configuration file:
-
mathml
(default): Math will be converted to MathML using
texmath. This method works with IE+mathplayer, Firefox, and
Opera, but not Safari.
-
jsMath
: Math will be rendered using the [jsMath][] javascript.
If you want to use this method, download jsMath
and jsMath Image Fonts
from the jsMath download page. You'll have two
.zip
archives. Unzip them both in the static/js
directory (a new
subdirectory, jsMath
, will be created). This works with all
browsers, but is slower and not as nice looking as MathML.
-
raw
: Math will be rendered as raw LaTeX codes.
Plugins
Plugins are small Haskell programs that transform a wiki page after it
has been converted from Markdown or RST. See the example plugins in the
plugins
directory. To enable a plugin, include the path to the plugin
(or its module name) in the plugins
field of the configuration file.
(If the plugin name starts with Network.Gitit.Plugin.
, gitit will assume that
the plugin is an installed module and will not look for a source file.)
Plugin support is enabled by default. However, plugin support makes
the gitit executable considerably larger and more memory-hungry.
If you don't need plugins, you may want to compile gitit without plugin
support. To do this, unset the plugins
Cabal flag:
cabal install --reinstall gitit -f-plugins
Note also that if you compile gitit for executable profiling, attempts
to load plugins will result in "internal error: PAP object entered!"
Accessing the wiki via git or darcs
All the pages and uploaded files are stored in a git or darcs
repository. By default, this lives in the wikidata
directory (though
this can be changed through configuration options). So you can interact
with the wiki using git command line tools:
git clone ssh://my.server.edu/path/of/wiki/wikidata
cd wikidata
vim Front\ Page.page # edit the page
git commit -m "Added message about wiki etiquette" Front\ Page.page
git push
If you now look at the Front Page on the wiki, you should see your changes
reflected there. Note that the pages all have the extension .page
.
Caching
By default, gitit does not cache content. If your wiki receives a lot of
traffic or contains pages that are slow to render, you may want to activate
caching. To do this, set the configuration option use-cache
to yes
.
By default, rendered pages and highlighted source files will be cached
in the cache
directory. (Another directory can be specified by setting
the cache-dir
configuration option.)
Cached pages are updated when pages are modified using the web
interface. They are not updated when pages are modified directly through
git or darcs. However, the cache can be refreshed manually by pressing
Ctrl-R when viewing a page, or by sending an HTTP GET or POST request to
/_expire/path/to/page
, where path/to/page
is the name of the page to
be expired.
Users who frequently update pages using git or darcs may wish to add a
hook to the repository that makes the appropriate HTTP request to expire
pages when they are updated. To facilitate such hooks, the gitit cabal
package includes an executable expireGititCache
. Assuming you are
running gitit at port 5001 on localhost, and the environment variable
CHANGED_FILES
contains a list of the files that have changed, you can
expire their cached versions using
expireGititCache http://localhost:5001 $CHANGED_FILES
Or you can specify the files directly:
expireGititCache http://localhost:5001 "Front Page.page" foo/bar/baz.c
This program will return a success status (0) if the page has been
successfully expired (or if it was never cached in the first place),
and a failure status (> 0) otherwise.
The cache is persistent through restarts of gitit. To expire all cached
pages, simply remove the cache
directory.
Using gitit with apache
Most users who run a public-facing gitit will want gitit to appear
at a nice URL like http://wiki.mysite.com
or
http://mysite.com/wiki
rather than http://mysite.com:5001
.
This can be achieved using apache's mod_proxy
.
Proxying to http://wiki.mysite.com
Set up your DNS so that http://wiki.mysite.com
maps to
your server's IP address. Make sure that the mod_proxy
module is
loaded, and set up a virtual host with the following configuration:
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName wiki.mysite.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/
RewriteEngine On
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:5001
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://127.0.0.1:5001$1 [P]
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>
Reload your apache configuration and you should be all set.
Proxying to http://mysite.com/wiki
Make sure the mod_proxy
, mod_headers
, mod_proxy_http
,
and mod_proxy_html
modules are loaded. mod_proxy_html
is an external module, which can be obtained here
(http://apache.webthing.com/mod_proxy_html/). It rewrites URLs that
occur in web pages. Here we will use it to rewrite gitit's links so that
they all begin with /wiki/
.
First, tell gitit not to compress pages, since mod_proxy_html
needs
uncompressed pages to parse. You can do this by setting the gitit
configuration option
compress-responses: no
Second, modify the link in the reset-password-message
in the
configuration file: instead of
http://$hostname$:$port$$resetlink$
set it to
http://$hostname$/wiki$resetlink$
Restart gitit.
Now add the following lines to the apache configuration file for the
mysite.com
server:
# These commands will proxy /wiki/ to port 5001
ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyPass /wiki/ http://127.0.0.1:5001/
<Location /wiki/>
SetOutputFilter proxy-html
ProxyPassReverse /
ProxyHTMLURLMap / /wiki/
RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding
</Location>
Reload your apache configuration and you should be set.
For further information on the use of mod_proxy_http
to rewrite URLs,
see the mod_proxy_html
guide.
Using gitit as a library
By importing the module Network.Gitit
, you can include a gitit wiki
(or several of them) in another happstack application. There are some
simple examples in the haddock documentation for Network.Gitit
.
Reporting bugs
Bugs may be reported (and feature requests filed) at
http://code.google.com/p/gitit/issues/list.
There is a mailing list for users and developers at
http://groups.google.com/group/gitit-discuss.
Acknowledgements
A number of people have contributed patches:
- Gwern Branwen helped to optimize gitit and wrote the
InterwikiPlugin. He also helped with the Feed module.
- Simon Michael contributed the patch adding RST support.
- Henry Laxen added support for password resets and helped with
the apache proxy instructions.
- Anton van Straaten made the process of page generation
more modular by adding Gitit.ContentTransformer.
- Robin Green helped improve the plugin API and interface, and
fixed a security problem with the reset password code.
- Thomas Hartman helped improve the index page, making directory
browsing persistent.
- Justin Bogner improved the appearance of the preview button.
- Kohei Ozaki contributed the ImgTexPlugin.
- mightybyte suggested making gitit available as a library,
and contributed a patch to ifLoggedIn that was needed to
make gitit usable with a custom authentication scheme.
I am especially grateful to the darcs team for using darcsit for
their public-facing wiki. This has helped immensely in identifying
issues and improving performance.
Gitit's default visual layout is shamelessly borrowed from Wikipedia.
The stylesheets are influenced by Wikipedia's stylesheets and by the
bluetrip CSS framework (see BLUETRIP-LICENSE). Some of the icons in
img/icons
come from bluetrip as well.