Hosted Tiddlywiki for sharing with someone else - is Bob the only/best solution?

[Tiago Espinha]

Hi!

I've very recently been introduced to the amazing world of Tiddlywiki. Everything's still very new to me but I'm already blown away by the model.

Now, I've come to the conclusion that plain static files aren't going to cut it for my use case. Even using something like Gitlab for saving, if there's two of us editing things we'll inevitably end up overwriting each other's tiddly at some point or another.

So I started looking at self-hosted wikis. I'm quite handy with servers, Docker and node, so none of that scares me.

I've tried this: https://github.com/djmaze/tiddlywiki-docker

But it seems like a smallish one-person project. And it doesn't appear to do anything about overwrites. As far as I can tell, the issue would still exist.

Then I found out about Bob.

My questions around Bob are:

- Is it reliable for long term usage? Or will I be locked in once the developer is tired of working on it?

- Is there something better than Bob for this use case?

- Bob allows multi users from the perspective that it locks tiddlies while they are being edited, but as far as I can tell, it does not record a username. That's kind of a dealbreaker... maybe?

Do people have more mainstream alternatives to Bob?

[Mohammad]

Hi Tiago,

If you want self hosted why not to use Tiddlywiki on Node.js!

Another option is Portable Node.js+Tiddlywiki on a thumb drive!

See https://github.com/garethflowers/nodejs-portable/releases

Regarding Bob, Jed Carty may have the complete answer.

--Mohammad

[Mark S.]

You can't share tiddlers with standard node.js.

You *could* share if you had a gentleman's (gentle women's) agreement to create all your tiddlers with your own initials and to NEVER write over someone else's tiddlers. This would only work with people working as a true team, where everyone follows the rules.

[Tiago Espinha]

Thanks for the input everyone.

I've been playing around further with Bob and unfortunately I managed to get it to delete its own settings file!! So I think I'll pass on that one for now.

I'm thinking about setting up 3 wikis... one for myself, one for the other person, and one for shared bits. Hopefully we could even make do with just 2 wikis if I figure out how to link them together somehow...

[Mark S.]

On Friday, April 17, 2020 at 2:09:40 PM UTC-7, Tiago Espinha wrote:

I've been playing around further with Bob and unfortunately I managed to get it to delete its own settings file!! So I think I'll pass on that one for now.

I've done this multiple times myself, and have posted how easy it is to do. Did

you do everything through the interface, or did you try to do it by hand?

[Tiago Espinha]

This happened whilst doing everything through the interface. I didn't want to fiddle around by hand due to all the warnings highlighting how dangerous it can be.

Seems quite brittle though :-( if I can delete the whole settings file just like that by clicking around, it doesn't give me a good feeling.

[Jed Carty]

What were you doing when the settings file got deleted? And was the file missing on the disk or was the manual settings interface just empty?

[TonyM]

Tiago,

of course it is trivial to share if others want readonly, and if more than one editor coordinate edits.

I can vouch for bob being quite stable and the multi-user version of tiddlywiki. Occasional issues arrise but if you can keep it in a trusted network e.g. LAN or secure it on the internet It is the best solution.

I am keen on using single file tw-reciever on php and it has some overwrite protection but this only results in a failed save.

I have the pieces to introduce a serial editing mechanisium ie check in check out, but just getting over eye surgery. This would work on top of single file and node if played carefully.

If users need to customise a little but not publish changes you could use the local storage plugin. For safety export changes to a file as a backup should the browser reuse the space.

I have being playing with the idea of secondary editors saving or sending their edits as json file of tiddlers for the owner to review and import. This could work for surveys and more.

Regards
Tony

[Tiago Espinha]

I was trying to get media upload to work. I was facing an issue where files were getting uploaded apparently correctly but I couldn't see them from the browser.

I _think_ the last thing I did was follow the advice to click an Update button (in the context of enabling the file server - can't remember exactly what it's called) and to click the button right below it which is meant to shutdown the server (to activate the file server changes).

After this I couldn't access it anymore because it went back to the default 8080 port, which is not what I had set it to.

I am using it behind basic auth Nginx if it makes a difference.

[Tiago Espinha]

Ah, and the file was there, but it was just blank.

On Friday, April 17, 2020 at 11:02:44 PM UTC+1, Jed Carty wrote:

[Tiago Espinha]

I've reconfigured settings and retraced my steps and now it seems to be fine... Fingers crossed!

I'll carry on using it for now.

On Friday, April 17, 2020 at 11:02:44 PM UTC+1, Jed Carty wrote: