Step 1. Download
Step 2. Run “instiki”
Step 3. Chuckle… “There is no step three!” (TM)
Ahem… there is always some fine print behind every short story, isn’t there? Fortunately, in case of Instiki there isn’t all that much of it.
Instiki should run on all Windows Versions. The oldest Windows Version tested is Windows 98SE with Internet Explorer 5.0. The newest is Windows Vista with IE 7.
The only prerequisite to Instiki installation is Ruby version 1.8.4 or greater and SQLite 3.3.4
NOTE: For OSX 10.4, you do not need to install SQLite. You do need to install SWIG. Once SWIG is installed you will need to re-install the “sqlite3-ruby” gem before starting. Once all of this is complete, do the extra steps in the README file. For step 8 substitute ‘rake rakefile’ for ‘rake migrate’.
NOTE: If you can’t solve the problems related to sqlite3 or SWIG, you may use mysql instead (it will be much easier if it is already installed). Create a database named like ‘instiki_prd’ in mysql, modify the production part in config/database.yml (refer the development part) and run “rake environment RAILS_ENV=production migrate” to create the needed tables.
Test your installation by running this command (same for all OSes):
ruby -v
It should respond with something like:
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-25) [i386-mswin32]
Note for Debian users: Your life is not that easy. Debian maintainers decided to split Ruby into several packages, so that you can run it in a toaster. Well, you’ll have to pay some price for it. See Debian for further details.
Instiki releases are distributed from Ruby Forge site . There are separate releases for each operating system. You need to download:
1 NNN stands for the latest released version. For example, 0.11.0.
2 .dmg is a standalone application package for OS X. It does not require even Ruby. If you don’t want a standalone Instiki with its own Ruby included, you should download .tgz archive and follow instructions for Linux.
Copy it to some directory where you have full write permissions. Unpack it:
This will create a new directory instiki-NNN. Go to that directory.
Within it, there is a README file with some potentially useful information. Oh, nevermind, you are not going to read it anyway. Just do:
chmod +x instiki; ./instiki
You should see some kind of console, saying:
=> Starting Instiki on http://127.0.0.1:2500 => Data files are stored in D:/instiki/instiki/storage/2500 [2005-01-18 12:56:35] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2005-01-18 12:56:35] INFO ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [i386-mswin32] [2005-01-18 12:56:35] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=2564 port=2500
If directly calling instiki doesn’t work on a Linux, try also:
ruby instiki
That’s it – you should now have a Wiki server on http://localhost:2500.
Here is some information that may be useful:
Note: Pages below were written for earlier versions. 0.11.0 is quite different. It is a normal Rails application that should be able to run as a FastCGI process, without port forwarding. If you do something like that, please share your experience with other Instiki users.
Just installed it as a Gem on OSX 10.4, and haven’t done anything to hook into SQLite
or Swig. (Swig was installed awhile ago as a separate Darwin Port? though.)
anyway, it seems to work, although i’ve only done really basic things with it.
what’s with the Sqlite/Swig warnings mentioned in the instructions?