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
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.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 needgit
in your system path. (Or darcs
or
hg
, if you're using darcs or mercurial 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.
You can control the port that gitit runs on using the
-p
option:
gitit -p 4000
will start gitit on port 4000. Additional runtime
options are described by gitit -h
.Using gitit
Wiki links and formatting
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 your pandoc was compiled to highlight:pandoc -v
Configuring and customizing gitit
Configuration options
Use the option-f [filename]
to specify a configuration file:gitit -f my.conf
If this option is not used, gitit will use a default configuration.
To get a copy of the default configuration file, which you
can customize, just type:gitit --print-default-config > my.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 a VCS other than git
By default, gitit will store wiki pages in a git repository in thewikidata
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
If you'd prefer to use mercurial, add:repository-type: Mercurial
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 modifycustom.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
. The default logo is 138x155 pixels.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/data/templates
by copying
the file into templates
, modifying it, and restarting gitit. The
page.st
template is the master template; it includes the others.
Interpolated variables are surrounded by $
s, so literal $
must
be backslash-escaped.Restricting access
If you want to limit account creation on your wiki, the easiest way to do this is to provide anaccess-question
in your configuration file. (See the commented
default configuration file.) Nobody will be able to create an account without
knowing the answer to the access question.Another approach is to use HTTP authentication. (See the config file comments on
authentication-method
.)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 theplugins
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 through git
All the pages and uploaded files are stored in a git repository. By default, this lives in thewikidata
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
.If you are using the darcs or mercurial backend, the commands will be slightly different. See the documentation for your VCS for details.
Performance
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 optionuse-cache
to yes
.
By default, rendered pages, highlighted source files, and exported PDFs
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 usingexpireGititCache 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.Idle
By default, GHC's runtime will repeatedly attempt to collect garbage when an executable like Gitit is idle. This means that gitit will, after the first page request, never use 0% CPU time and sleep, but will use ~1%. This can be bad for battery life, among other things.To fix this, one can disable the idle-time GC with the runtime flag
-I0
:gitit -f my.conf +RTS -I0 -RTS
Using gitit with apache
Most users who run a public-facing gitit will want gitit to appear at a nice URL likehttp://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.Using nginx to achieve the same
Drop a file calledwiki.example.com.conf
into /etc/nginx/conf.d
(or where ever your distribution puts it).server {
listen 80;
server_name wiki.example.com
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5001/;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_redirect off;
}
access_log /var/log/nginx/wiki.example.com.log main;
}
Reload your nginx config and you should be all set.
Proxying to http://mysite.com/wiki
Make sure the mod_proxy
, mod_headers
, mod_proxy_http
,
and mod_proxy_html
modules are loaded. mod_proxy_html
is an external module, which can be obtained here. It rewrites URLs that
occur in web pages. Here we will use it to rewrite gitit's links so that
they all begin with /wiki/
.First, tell gitit not to compress pages, since
mod_proxy_html
needs
uncompressed pages to parse. You can do this by setting the gitit
configuration optioncompress-responses: no
Second, modify the link in the reset-password-message
in the
configuration file: instead ofhttp://$hostname$:$port$$resetlink$
set it tohttp://$hostname$/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/
ProxyHTMLDocType "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd'>" XHTML
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.from https://github.com/jgm/gitit
https://github.com/jgm/gitit/tree/master/