encryption in TW5: node: Bob

[Jacob Barton]

Dear all,

First a note to say that I find TiddlyWiki generally AWESOME! I have been on the hunt for good wiki software for ages, and some combination of the smooth UI and its cavalier flexibility, is a good fit for me somehow.

I have successfully gotten a Bob server running with node/nginx on a virtual Ubuntu server somewhere in the cloud. I started with TiddlyServer, was deterred by its RAM usage and wanted to serve multiple wikis. (Bob is running at about 269MB RAM right now, maybe that's as good as it gets?)

At any rate, my main concern in writing is about encryption. I have searched to no avail but found some solutions that are incompatible with serving a wiki to the wild internet, and this ethos of "use it like a webpage, own it like a document". The basic feature of "click the lock and enter a password", as I understand it, does not accomplish this, as when I reload after saving there is no trace of password protection.

Is the feature of assigning a single username-password pair to a wiki in existence? Is there some tutorial somewhere that I've missed?

Much thanks,

Jacob

[Jed Carty]

There is a server server to go with bob (https://gitlab.com/ooktech-public/securewikiserver). It has been used at Ooktech.xyz for a while now, but there has been almost no interest in it so I haven't done much more with documenting it.

I have bob running on my computer and it is currently taking about 180mb of ram, the ram usage is dependent on how many wikis are loaded on the server. When Bob starts it is only the node process and one wiki, as you open more wikis they are loaded into memory and take up more ram. You can unload a wiki after it is loaded to reduce the memory usage, but so far I haven't implemented a good way to have it automatically unload wikis that aren't in use without causing a lot of problems for people on inconsistent connections.

The secure server lets you have as many people and wikis as you want and you can give fine grained control over permissions both globally and on individual wikis for things like creating, viewing and editing. Eventually I will get around to documenting it better but like I said, there wasn't much of a response.

[Joshua Fontany]

Aaaah, that's where that went. Commenting to follow the thread. Mahalo (thanks)!

Joshua F

[Donald Coates]

Jacob just wanted to make sure you were aware of vanilla nodejs authentication.

Jed - good lord I have been dying for authentication for Bob for what seems like forever.  AFAIK it is listed as 'under consideration' on the github plugin page and I have been anxiously watching for it to change!  Now I have a new project to play with....  But if possible maybe put some mention of this there?  I would think anyone that uses the nodejs server would be interested in this.

[Jacob Barton]

Ok, Neat! Thank you for documenting this as far as you have, I know it can feel like a thankless task.

I started to work through the installation. When I run ./start.sh I get an error in the nohup.out log, which traces to line 49 of wikistart.js (https://gitlab.com/ooktech-public/securewikiserver/-/blob/master/wikiStart.js) - it is trying to load "./TiddlyWiki5/boot/boot.js" but shouldn't that be pulling that path dynamically from, like, WikiPathBase in my config file or something?

Thanks and more thanks,

Jacob