Using Joplin to publish a wiki

You can access the wiki here.

Why Joplin as a wiki software

For a few years now, I've published a personal wiki. This basically means sharing a part of my personal notes that I decided to make public. I used to use dedicated wiki software. Started with DokuWiki, then moved to Wiki.js. The problem was that reaching out to the wiki to take notes broke my workflow, so I didn't write much. At the same time, I was trying to settle on a single note taking software. This is where Joplin comes in.

Joplin fits my use cases nicely:

• It's open source.
• Allows me to take notes in Markdown format.
• Has self-hosted sync options (bonus by being builtin).
• Allows me to have a shared notebook with my partner.
• Allows me to publish notes aka my personal wiki (using Joplin Server).

How I did it

Joplin allows me to publish individual notes (make them publicly viewable), but I wanted to publish an entire directory/notebook (my wiki). For this reason I went with a slightly different approach. I'm using a Github action to fetch my Wiki notebook through the joplin cli and export the contents as markdown files. There is another action that takes these markdown files and builds the Wiki using mdBook.

In other words:

• I write in my notetaking app (Joplin) inside a Wiki notebook (directory).
• Github fetches these notes and exports them as markdown files.
• An intermediate step builds the Wiki summary (a sitemap needed by mdBook).
• Lastly, Github builds and publishes the Wiki with Github pages.

This happens once a day at midnight (UTC). The contents of the repo are something like a daily snapshot of the Wiki notebook.

Hosting Joplin server

I host Joplin server using Docker compose:

services:
  joplin:
    image: joplin/server:latest
    container_name: joplin
    ports:
      - "22300:22300"
    environment:
      - APP_BASE_URL=https://joplin.myserver.com
      - APP_PORT=22300
      - SQLITE_DATABASE=/data/db.sqlite
    volumes:
      - joplin_data:/data
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  joplin_data:

This runs the server on port 22300 using an SQLite database. Unless you have lots of users, I see no reason to use the PostgreSQL database option.

Want to the same as well?

• Fork the repo.
• Set the following Github secrets (for the action):
  • JOPLIN_PATH - your Joplin server instance URL. Something like https://joplin.myserver.com
  • JOPLIN_USER - the Joplin user that is gonna be used to fetch the contents. I created a user for this with whom I share the Wiki notebook.
  • JOPLIN_PASSWORD - the password for the Joplin user.

The step that builds the mdBook is on a separate action. If you want to build another kind of site, for example a personal blog, you can change this action to build something else. There's a bunch of Github actions already setup for that.

Conclusion

Joplin and mdBook are pretty cool. Finally, I can write my notes in a single place and easily keep them synced between my devices. I highly recommend giving Joplin a try.

Stay safe :P