Setting up a local preview or creating a static site

It’s usually nice to be able to see changes locally, before having the whole world see them. Also, it’s often convenient to use ikiWiki to create a static site. Both these tasks are easy to do (but aren’t documented too well). Here are brief instructions:

1. First install ikiwiki on your local machine.

2. Clone the wiki repository into the directory local-wiki.

3. Copy your wiki setup file from the server into preview.setup and put it into the local local-wiki directory.

4. Edit preview.setup and make the following changes:

   srcdir: .
   destdir: ./html_output
   exclude: (^|/)Makefile$|\.setup$|(^|/)html_output
   

   Also edit libdir if you have custom ikiwiki scripts on the server

5. For speed improvement you might want to comment out the lines with

   rcs
   git_wrapper
   cgi_wrapper
   

6. Disable unnecessary plugins: userlist, notifyemail, 404, recentchanges.

7. Disable the cgiurl, and discussion pages. If you don’t want the default documentation etc. that comes with the default ikiWiki, also disable the default underlay.

   # cgiurl: 
   underlaydir: /dev/null
   discussion: 0
   

8. Create a file called Makefile with the following:

   refresh:
           ikiwiki --setup preview.setup --verbose --refresh
   
   rebuild:
           rm -rf html_output
           ikiwiki --setup preview.setup --verbose --rebuild
   

9. Run make rebuild. Now running make will refresh your wiki. Open html_output/index.html in your local browser and you have a local preview.

10. If you wanted to create a static site, then the contents are in the html_output directory. rsync this directory to your server and you’re good to go.

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