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Editing GitHub Wikis locally with the Gollum Gem

By x3ro on April 28, 2011

You can easily edit your GitHub hosted wikis by cloning them to your local machines ( yes, the GitHub Wikis are also backed by Git ) and using your favorite text editor. Alternatively, GitHub open-sourced their Wiki software named Gollum which you can install as a Ruby Gem:

$ gem install gollum

This however will not install some required Gems for editing, because those seem to be considered development dependencies. To install those dependencies, first install the “bundle” Gem:

$ gem install bundler

Then check where your “Gollum”-Gem lies and install the development dependencies using the “bundler”-Gem:

$ gem which gollum
/Users/lucas/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/gollum-1.3.0/lib/gollum.rb
$ bundle install /Users/lucas/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/gollum-1.3.0/
...
...
Your bundle is complete! Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

As you can see I stripped the last part of the path given by gem which, to the Gem’s root directory.

This should leave you with a working installation of Gollum which supports all the features the GitHub.com Wiki supports. Now navigate to your cloned wiki directory and run:

$ gollum

Posted in , , | Tagged , , , , | 5 Responses

5 responses to “Editing GitHub Wikis locally with the Gollum Gem”

  1. Alex Stone
    Alex Stone July 29, 2011 at 8:51 pm |

    Thanks for the info. I’m new to writing a wiki using Gollum/Github, and i ask what seem like a simple question. I have Gollum running with my cloned wiki in a local repo, pages built, etc, but how do i add a sidebar to my wiki? I’ve looked everywhere for info on this, to no avail.

    Any help would be appreciated.

    Alex.

  2. x3ro
    x3ro July 29, 2011 at 8:58 pm |

    I haven’t tried it, but from what I can tell from this Gollum Issue ( https://github.com/github/gollum/issues/122 ), you need to create a “_Sidebar.md” file and it should automagically work. Did you install Gollum via. RubyGems or did you clone their repository? What version are you using?

  3. Alex Stone
    Alex Stone July 29, 2011 at 9:11 pm |

    My version is 1.3.1 installed from the gollum git repo, and from the little i can find sidebar implementation is supposed to be reasonably mature now.

    I’ve tried all sorts of _Sidebar.md incarnations without success so far. The magic is gone for the moment it seems.

    Thanks for the quick reply, i’ll keep fishing around, and see what else the interlink throws up.

    Alex.

  4. x3ro
    x3ro July 29, 2011 at 9:50 pm |

    Hey there. I just tried if the sidebar feature worked for me, and interestingly it did.

    I cloned this GitHub Wiki, which has a sidebar ( https://github.com/typus/typus.wiki.git ), and started Gollum 1.3.1, and the sidebar appeared for me.

  5. Alex Stone
    Alex Stone July 29, 2011 at 11:32 pm |

    Thanks for the heads up, i’ll have a look.

    I appreciate your help.

    Alex.

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